Global Rundown
- Communities in Nepal’s Madhesh province, the country’s largest producer of grain, are building artificial ponds to conserve groundwater through summer drought.
- The majority of Florida’s largest freshwater springs, located near farmland and encroaching development, are polluted.
- Last month, Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa signed an executive order to fold the government’s Environment Ministry into the Ministry of Energy and Mining.
- In northern Kenya, where water shortages disproportionately affect women and girls, a new research effort is prioritizing the health of an understudied African Great Lake.
- A $3 billion project to conserve and restore coastal wetlands in Louisiana has been cancelled by Gov. Jeff Landry.
The Lead
Last month, Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa moved to eliminate the government’s Ministry of Environment, Water, and Ecological Transition and transfer its duties to the Ministry of Energy and Mining, a decision that has alarmed environmentalists, scientists, and Indigenous leaders.
“The government’s intention is very clear — to be a machine gun of extractivism,” Natalia Greene, an environmental advocate with the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature, told the Associated Press.
With the mining industry poised to expand in Ecuador, Al Jazeera reports that the south-central village of Rio Blanco — home to roughly 80 families, many of whom are Indigenous — has become a case study for the local devastation such operations can bring. In 1999, the Canadian International Minerals Corporation secured the right to mine in Rio Blanco and promised jobs to community members, only to leave many in debt and without work when operations began. The site was acquired in 2013 by the Chinese company Ecuagoldmining, though little changed save for the landscape, which lost its wetlands and streams to overextraction and pollution.
Since the mine’s closure in 2018, the combination of ecological loss, joblessness, broken promises, and poverty have spilled over into violence.
“The community was broken, fractured,” Eloy Alfaro, an expert in mining conflicts and reconciliation, tells Al Jazeera. “Since then, there have been murders. There have been suicides. They have been completely torn apart.”
Recent WaterNews from Circle of Blue
- Political Left, Right, and Everyone Between, United Over Water — In a raucous era, citizens in Indiana find a safe place for consensus on water supply.
- With Wildfire-Prevention Work, Flagstaff Seeks to Avoid the Next Devastating Flood — A severe fire in the city’s central watershed could lead to $2.8 billion in damages.
This Week’s Top Water Stories, Told In Numbers
51
Percent of land in Nepal’s Madhesh province, known as the country’s “grain basket,” on which paddy had been planted as of July 25, an unusually small production area attributed to late monsoon rains and extreme summer heat. These climatological changes have brought widespread water shortages to Nepal’s plains and hampered harvests, Mongabay reports. In a new analysis published in late August, scientists in the region declared both a meteorological drought — rainfall deficits of between 30 percent and 50 percent — and hydrological drought, highlighting the drying of rivers, lakes, and groundwater. No strangers to summer drought, residents in Madhesh and other plains communities have taken to building artificial ponds to collect groundwater during the spring that can then be used for irrigation or drinking during the summer. These ponds are playing the role that the region’s forests and wetlands — which have been lost to deforestation — once did to recharge groundwater and offer natural protection against flash floods and soil erosion.
100,000
Square mileage of the Floridan aquifer, which supplies 90 percent of Florida’s drinking water, the Associated Press reports. Much of this water reaches the surface by passing through layers of porous rock, ultimately filling rivers or emerging as freshwater springs, of which there are more than 1,000 across the state. The largest “first magnitude” springs — those that discharge more than 65 million gallons of water each day — are concentrated mainly in northern and central Florida, where agriculture and development are pervasive. More than 1,000 people move to Florida each day. Fertilizer and pesticide runoff, phosphate mining, construction, and urban waste have all contributed to these springs’ decline. Of 30 “first magnitude” springs, AP reports, 26 are considered polluted.
On the Radar
Women and girls in Kenya’s northern Turkana and Marsabit counties, where freshwater shortages are rampant, are forced to abandon their businesses and schooling to spend hours each day fetching drinking water, which is often contaminated, Deutsche Welle reports. Between 50 and 75 percent of people in these two communities live with moderate-to-high water insecurity, exacerbated by drought and infrastructural lack.
Looking on a map, one would not immediately guess the region is in dire need of fresh water. In between these two counties stretches Lake Turkana, one of Africa’s Great Lakes and a “lifeline for nearly half a million people.” But Turkana’s waters are saline, making it the world’s largest desert lake. Though it is the continent’s fourth-largest lake, Turkana hasn’t been systematically surveyed since 1974, a fact a new UNESCO-World Food Programme project will aim to remedy.
The new effort will seek to better understand the lake’s potential to support sustainable food systems, supply drinking water, withstand climatic and human changes, and bolster local economies. Researchers will also study the Oro River, which supplies more than 90 percent of Lake Turkana’s inflow.
Wetland Watch
Plaquemines Parish: A $3 billion wetlands restoration project, intended to protect New Orleans and the southern Louisiana coast from erosion and severe storms, has been cancelled by Gov. Jeff Landry, Politico reports. Roughly $618 million had already been spent on the effort, which was introduced as part of the state’s 50-year plan post-Hurricane Katrina to minimize wetland erosion. “We worked very, very hard to get the politics out of coastal policy,” Sidney Coffee, who chaired the state’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority after Katrina, told Politico. “I think we’re back to square one. The politics are absolutely back.”
