The Nile is one of the world’s most famous rivers. It’s also Africa’s most important freshwater system. About 300 million people live in the 11 countries it flows through. Many rely on its waters for agriculture and fishing to make a living.

The Nile’s two main tributaries, the Blue Nile and the White Nile, come together in Sudan’s capital city, Khartoum. This industrial hub has grown rapidly over the past few decades.

The Nile is not immune to the same pollutants that affect rivers all over the world. Plastic debris is of particular concern. Over time plastics break down into smaller pieces known as microplastics. These are tiny plastic particles with a maximum size of five millimetres, all the way down to the nanoscale. Recent research found that

rivers are modelled to export up to 25,000 tons of plastics from their sub-basins to seas annually. Over 80% of this amount is microplastic.

This has huge negative consequences for biodiversity and the climate. As microplastics degrade, scientists have found, they produce greenhouse gases. Airborne microplastics may influence the climate by scattering and absorbing solar and terrestrial radiation, leading to atmospheric warming or cooling depending on particle size, shape and composition. It also negatively affects animal and human health. Microplastics have been shown in laboratory studies to be toxic to animals and cells.

Much of the research about microplastics in African waters has focused on marine and coastal areas. To address this gap, I conducted a study to assess the presence of microplastics in the River Nile in Khartoum. My students and I tested for the presence of microplastics in Nile tilapia. This popular African freshwater fish species forms the basis of commercial fisheries in many African countries, including Sudan.

Photo by Islam Hassan on Unsplash

The results do not make for happy reading. In the 30 freshly caught fish we surveyed, we found a total of 567 microplastic particles. This shows that the River Nile is contaminated with microplastics that can be consumed or absorbed in various ways by the tilapia and other aquatic organisms.

Our sample

The fish used in our study were caught just after the meeting point of the two Niles, known in Arabic as Al-Mogran.

We visited the Al-Mawrada fish market in the Omdurman area, which is also alongside the Nile. All 30 specimens we bought were freshly caught.

We dissected the fish to remove their digestive tracts. The individual tracts were treated so they would digest any organic matter they contained without interfering with the analysis of microplastics. The resulting solution was subject to another extraction procedure and we then conducted physical and chemical analyses.

Every specimen had microplastics in its digestive tract.

The number ranged from as few as five to as many as 47 particles per single fish. In total we identified 567 particles. This is high compared to studies that have reported microplastics in tilapia species in other rivers and lakes. There is, as yet, no global guideline or standard for what might be an “acceptable” number.

Shape, size and colour

We detected different sizes of microplastics (0.04mm to 4.94mm), shapes (fibres, fragments, films, foams and pellets) and colours. The most common were very small (less than 1mm), fibrous – they appear slender and elongated – and coloured (dyed).

These characteristics make sense because of how fish and other aquatic organisms feed. Nile tilapia are versatile feeders: they consume a variety of organisms including phytoplankton, aquatic plants, invertebrates, detritus, bacterial films, as well as other fish and fish eggs. That puts them at a high risk of ingesting microplastics.

Nile tilapia are also more likely to consume particles that are within a similar size range as their natural prey, as well as the same shape and colour.

Smaller microplastics are especially good carriers for other pollutants such as heavy metals, resulting in additional health risks. Their small size also makes it easier for them to move into organs like the liver. Studies have found microplastics in the tissues, muscles, livers, blubber and lungs of other aquatic as well as marine mammal species.

Fibres, the most dominant shape found in our specimens, stay in the intestine for longer than other microplastic shapes. This, too, can lead to health problems for the fish. Coloured microplastics contain dyes, many of which contain toxic chemicals.

This all has serious implications for human health, as people catch and eat the fish, which introduces those microplastics and associated chemicals into their bloodstreams.

Pollution sources

Where does all this plastic originate? For starters, 65% of plastic waste in Khartoum is disposed of in open dumps. From there, it contaminates water bodies and other parts of the environment.

Image by Refaat Naiem from Pixabay

The city’s wastewater treatment system is ineffective. The three wastewater treatment plants in Khartoum state, Karary, Wd-Daffiaa and Soba, are outdated and do not meet local and international standards. That means untreated effluent from domestic, industrial and agricultural activities is another probable source of microplastic pollution.

There are also countless recreational sites along the River Nile in Khartoum. The Nile Street is the most popular in the capital city, hosting water sports, restaurants, cafes, clubs, event venues and hotels, as well as the tea ladies (women who serve hot beverages from makeshift mobile cafes along the banks of the river). However, waste disposal and collection practices are sorely lacking, so plastic litter from these leisure activities leaks into the river.

No easy fix

Tackling microplastic pollution is not easy. It will require technological advances, as well as the collective efforts of consumers, producers, governments and the scientific community.

As consumers, we need to change our behaviour around plastic products, especially single-use plastics. For example, opt for fabric shopping bags instead of plastic bags; use glass and metal containers. Recycling is also important.

Governments must enforce waste management regulations and improve waste management practices, as well as helping to improve public awareness. Strategies and policies must explicitly feature microplastics.

Scientists can not only fill the knowledge gaps around microplastics. Communicating scientific findings is crucial; so too is developing innovations to protect against microplastics and their harmful effects.

I would like to thank and acknowledge my student Hadeel Alamin, who conducted this study with me.

Dalia Saad, Researcher, School of Chemistry, University of the Witwatersrand, University of the Witwatersrand

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The head of the New Orleans office of the Army Corps of Engineers, Col. Cullen Jones, is quoted by them as saying that in order to push the saltwater away, the flow rate of the Mississippi needs to be higher than 300,000 cubic feeet per second.

The megadrought that has gripped the American southwest for two decades, and which has been made substantially more likely by human-caused climate change, has had an unfortunate effect on the Mississippi River, denying it the volume of water that would ordinarily flow into it from rains, snow melt and other bodies of water. The dry spell 2000- 2019 has been found by scientists to have seen the driest soil conditions since the year 800 CE, when Harun al-Rashid ruled the Abbasid caliphate from the newly founded capital of Baghdad and Charlemagne presided over the Holy Roman Empire from Aachen.

Scientists estimate that human-caused climate change, provoked by our driving gasoline cars and heating and cooling our buildings by burning coal and fossil gas, has made the drought 19% worse than it would otherwise have been.

Not only has there been less precipitation, it has been hotter, so water evaporates in greater quantities.

As a result, right now the flow rate of the Mississippi has plummeted to only 150,000 cubic feet per second.

So the saltwater of the Gulf is gradually flowing north into the Mississippi. Eventually it will deprive 800,000 people of drinking water and affect four parishes of New Orleans.

It isn’t good to drink salt water. It causes people to excrete more water than they take in, so they die of dehydration and thirst even while they keep trooping to the toilet to urinate.

Drinking water will have to be brought in by barge, an expensive proposition, or ultimately by a water pipeline, which will be even more expensive.

This problem is not going away. In fact, it will get worse.

The EPA explains, “Climate change is affecting the Southwest. Temperatures have increased by almost 2°F in the last century, with the 2001-2010 decade being the warmest since records began 110 years ago. The length of the frost-free season has increased by 19 days in recent decades. Average annual temperatures are projected to rise an additional 3.5°F to 9.5°F by the end of this century, with the greatest temperature increases expected in the summer and fall.[1] Drought conditions are already common in the Southwest and drought periods are expected to become more frequent, intense, and longer. Drought will affect important water sources, including the Colorado River Basin. Combined with expected population growth, climate change will exacerbate existing stresses.”

So here’s the kicker. It isn’t just New Orleans that is menaced by sea water intrusion because of human-caused climate change.

Basra in Iraq is in the same dilemma. The mighty Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow together in southern Iraq into a body of water called the Shatt al-Arab, which then flows out into the Gulf. The Iran-Iraq War in 1980-1988 was fought in part over ownership of the Shatt al-Arab. Because of drought, heat and damming works to the north in Iran and Turkey, the flow rate of the Shatt al-Arab has been much decreased. The saltwater of the Gulf is therefore intruding north. Since people irrigate off the Shatt, it has harmed agriculture and date orchards.

This problem is also slated to get worse.

Then there is Alexandria, Egypt’s second-largest city, which was founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BCE. It sits at the mouth of the Nile Delta and is also menaced by saltwater intrusion, from the Mediterranean.

When we talk about sea water rise as a result of climate change, we often concentrate on the threat of flooding of coastal areas. It isn’t only that the seas are rising. River deltas suffer from subsidence and so sink over time. And the rate of the water flow in great rivers is being reduced on several continents by extra heat and desiccation. So here is another outcome, the salinization of major sources of fresh water that had made some great coastal cities possible.

( Middle East Monitor ) – One of the most pressing issues of the 21st century is the management and allocation of the limited freshwater resources in the world. Since an important number of those water resources are trans-boundary, crossing the political boundaries of more than one nation, the complexity of the problem has increased over the years. In dealing with trans-boundary water disputes, riparian states such as Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda and Sudan mostly prefer water diplomacy mechanisms that involve the processes and institutions through which the national interests and identities of sovereign states are represented to one another.

States’ claim of sovereignty

On the one hand, states have been the main actors in shaping trans-boundary water policies and conducting water diplomacy throughout the last few decades of water disputes. On the other hand, international organisations, international non-governmental organisations and science-policy initiatives joined the water diplomacy processes as new actors, with the coming of issues of scarcity, pollution and the sharing of water resources in order to take the attention of the international community. With the participation of these actors in water diplomacy, new approaches related to the management of trans-boundary water resources, for example, the sharing of benefits such as energy, food and services to be obtained from water resources instead of sharing water resources per se, have been developed.

With the increase in the use of trans-boundary rivers for consumption purposes, such as the expansion of irrigation since the last quarter of the 19th century, many states have claimed mutual sovereignty and rights of use over trans-boundary water resources. As a result of these discourses and actions, a series of international customary law principles have been adopted. The riparian states of trans-boundary waters have signed numerous bilateral and multilateral agreements, protocols and memoranda of understanding on the use, management and sharing of these resources. In other words, treaty (written) and customary (unwritten) international water principles of law, as well as traditional diplomatic methods, have been developed by the states as the main tools for resolving disputes regarding trans-boundary waters.

Trans-boundary water disputes in Middle East

The Middle East is regarded as one of the most challenged regions in terms of trans-boundary surface and groundwater resources management and allocation between two or more countries. In addition to the constraints of natural water resources, the region suffers from an abundance of issues that compound water security, including a rapidly growing and displaced population, uneven economic development, limited amount of water supply that is irregularly distributed, the negative impacts of climate change and variability and poor water management and allocation practices both within and between states. Some 60 per cent of the water in the region flows across international borders, complicating resource management. The geopolitical importance of the region and the conflicts that arise have consequently resulted in aggravating the usual problems of using water in a variety of settings in the Nile or Euphrates-Tigris river basins.

Nile River dispute

The Nile basin is considered one of the world’s hydro-political hotspots, and much has been debated in academic and policy circles about the likelihood of interstate conflict between the Nile countries. In the late 1920s, colonial water-sharing agreements were concluded in the Nile basin under the full control of Great Britain. Following the wave of independence in Africa in the 1950s, all upstream riparians declared void those agreements, including the most important one, namely the 1929 Nile Water Agreement, which was later replaced by the still legally binding 1959 Agreement for the Full Utilisation of the Nile Waters, under which the two riparians agreed to share the waters in proportions of 75 per cent and 25 per cent for Egypt and 25 per cent for Sudan, respectively. The 1959 agreement has never been accepted by any of the upstream riparians, causing recurring tensions and disputes over water. Moreover, tensions in the Nile basin waters were often raised by political rhetoric, particularly between the Egyptian and Ethiopian leadership. Egypt, so heavily dependent on the Nile waters, has used its military might and hegemonic status to warn the upper riparians, primarily Ethiopia, not to undertake any projects that would risk Egypt’s share of the Nile.

Article continues after bonus IC video
Al Jazeera English: “Will Ethiopia compromise on its Grand Renaissance Dam? | Inside Story

Challenging this historical status quo, in March 2011, the Ethiopian government announced plans to construct a hydroelectric dam on the Blue Nile, namely the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), which is planned to generate 6,000 megawatts (MW) of electricity, becoming Africa’s largest power plant. Concerns have been raised over the dam’s impact on Egypt. Tensions over the dam increased in May 2011, when Ethiopia temporarily diverted the flow of the Blue Nile as part of the construction process.

After exchanges of harsh rhetoric between the heads of state, the foreign ministers of Egypt and Ethiopia met and agreed to hold further talks on the construction of the dam. Hence, the water dispute in the Nile basin was intimately related to unfair clauses in the historical bilateral sharing agreements. Additionally, the increasing ability and desire of the upstream states, namely Ethiopia, to challenge Egypt’s status as a hydro-hegemon and the overall status quo constitute contemporary reasons for tensions over water. The Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) was established in 1999 to find sustainable technical, institutional, legal and political solutions to the hydro-political challenges centred on a river embedded in regional geopolitical complexity.

Tigris-Euphrates basin

Trans-boundary water issues started to be a part of regional politics when the three major riparian states, namely Turkiye, Syria and Iraq, introduced major water and land resource development projects in the Tigris-Euphrates basin. In this context, large-scale dams and irrigation systems were initiated in the early 1960s. Owing to the competitive nature of these uncoordinated national water development projects, disagreements over trans-boundary water uses surfaced, and the riparian states opted for diplomatic negotiations to deal with their disagreements. As the national water development projects progressed, incompatibilities between water supply and demand occurred throughout the river basin. Even though no hot conflict was reported among the riparian states concerning water sharing, the sporadic technical negotiations could not prepare the ground for a comprehensive treaty on equitable and effective trans-boundary water management in the basin.

In the Tigris-Euphrates basin, the riparian states preferred water diplomacy mechanisms, namely diplomatic negotiations, to resolve the crises. Most of the crises were related to Iraq’s concerns regarding the impact of the construction and filling of the dams in Turkiye and Syria. Thus, diplomats and technocrats from the 3 countries met several times, although on an irregular basis, to exchange information concerning the technical details of the construction and the filling of the dams. In the period between the 1960s and the 1990s, the riparian states were too rigid in their position, emphasizing their absolute water rights over the rivers. With the emergence of a conducive overall political environment in the early 2000s, state representatives adopted a more needs-based approach by concluding a series of memoranda of understanding on the protection of the environment, water quality management, water efficiency, drought management and flood protection, with a view to addressing the adverse effects of climate change.

On the other hand, in the early 1980s, the riparian states in the Tigris-Euphrates basin managed to establish the institutional framework of the Joint Technical Committee (JTC), whose members included participants from all three riparian states. However, the riparian states did not agree to give the JTC clear and commonly agreed-upon functions. On the contrary, the states continued unilateral and uncoordinated water and land development projects, and the JTC meetings did not make an effective contribution to the settlement of the trans-boundary water dispute. It also did not provide a platform for delineating the priorities and needs of the co-riparians as a basis for addressing regional water problems.

Water diplomacy mechanisms, particularly at the trans-boundary level, have been introduced in the Tigris-Euphrates basin with the aim of reaching agreeable solutions between parties that have diverging interests as well as competing water development schemes. With the help of formal institutions like the JTC, high-level water diplomacy frameworks, water-sharing protocols and memoranda of understanding, the national interests and identities of sovereign states are represented to one another. Although these institutions may not have been effective most of the time in terms of the protection and efficient use and management of water and other related resources, they served to place trans-boundary water issues within a legitimate and peaceful realm, rather than mixing them with potentially conflict-laden issues, such as border security and territorial disputes, which might otherwise escalate into hot confrontations. However, there still does not exist a multilateral treaty regime involving all of the stakeholders concerned, including civil society organisations and private companies in energy, agriculture and the environment, as well as relevant development-related sectors, for the effective and equitable use and management of trans-boundary waters in the basin.

Via Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Egypt and Ethiopia have waged a diplomatic war of words over Ethiopia’s massive new dam – the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam – on the Blue Nile, which started filling up in July 2020. The political row has threatened to get out of hand on occasion but now the two countries have finally agreed to conclude “a mutually acceptable agreement” within four months. We asked John Mukum Mbaku, the author of a recent article on the Ethiopian dam and a co-author of a book on the Nile River’s changing legal regime, to answer four key questions.

What is the context of the current tussle?

Ethiopia, whose highlands provide more than 85% of the water that flows into the Nile, has long argued that it has the right under international law to manage resources within its own borders for its national development. It sees the “Nile as a gift of God” given to Ethiopians to use for their development.

Egypt, which depends on the Nile for more than 90% of its fresh water, has argued that the Ethiopian dam represents a threat to its water security and its very existence as a people.

The decision by Addis Ababa to begin construction of the dam on the Blue Nile in 2011 exacerbated an already deteriorating relationship between Ethiopia and its two downstream neighbours, Egypt and Sudan, over access to Nile waters. After Egypt’s diplomatic efforts failed to stop construction, Cairo redirected its energies to securing a legally binding agreement for filling and operating the dam.

But no mutually acceptable agreement for filling and operating the dam was ever reached.

In August 2020, Addis Ababa began to fill the dam’s reservoir. That process was repeated in 2021 and 2022.

In 2023, Ethiopian prime minister Abiy Ahmed announced that the country would delay the fourth filling until September “to alleviate the concerns of neighbouring people”.

The dam’s reservoir filling in particular, and its operation in general, are issues that the three countries must resolve, most likely through a legally binding agreement or treaty.

In February 2022, the Ethiopian dam started producing electricity. Egyptians claimed that Addis Ababa was “violating its obligations under the 2015 Declaration of Principles” and endangering Egyptian “water interests”.

What are the main sticking points going into the talks?

An agreement would have to explicitly deal with issues that are important to Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan. The most important are Egypt’s and Sudan’s historically acquired rights to Nile waters. The rights were granted by the 1929 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty and the 1959 bilateral agreement between Egypt and Sudan (1959 Nile Treaty).

After estimating the average annual flow of the Nile River as measured at Aswan to be 84 billion cubic metres, the two treaties granted 66% of Nile waters to Egypt, 22% to Sudan and 12% to account for seepage and evaporation. These allocations exhausted all the Nile’s average annual flow of water. Egypt was also granted veto power over all construction projects on the Nile and its tributaries.

These rights came to be known as Egypt’s and Sudan’s acquired rights. They have been the main sticking point in efforts to conclude a treaty between all 11 Nile riparian states for the allocation of the waters of the Nile, as well as between Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan over the Ethiopian dam.

While Ethiopia and other upstream riparian states see these two treaties as colonial anachronisms that have no relevance to modern Nile governance, Egypt and Sudan insist that they are binding.

What impact would a breakthrough have on other Nile Basin agreements?

The impact will depend on what type of agreement is reached. Assume that both Egypt and Sudan agree to abandon the rights granted by the 1929 and 1959 treaties. They could then enter into negotiation with Ethiopia to produce a new treaty that creates rights for all three states.

Such a treaty could provide the impetus for all 11 Nile Basin states to return to the Cooperative Framework Agreement, which was expected to provide a legal framework for governing the Nile based on equitable and reasonable water use. The framework agreement has been in limbo since Egypt and Sudan rejected it.

The other Nile Basin states see these colonial-era treaties as a violation of international law principles, and a breach of the vision of the Nile Basin Initiative.

What other claims threaten the status quo?

Egypt fears that if Addis Ababa is allowed to fill the reservoir without a legally binding agreement, other Nile Basin states might also take unilateral actions. This could harm Egypt’s water security and ability to control projects on the Nile River and its tributaries.

Then, there is the matter of how to manage issues related to climate change, such as droughts and floods. The existence of the dam means Addis Ababa’s cooperation will be required. In times of drought, for example, the Ethiopian dam will be expected to release some water to help Egypt and Sudan.

Ethiopia’s right to water for agriculture and household consumption is an issue that has not yet been agreed upon by all three countries.

Egypt and Sudan are worried about the harm that could come to them from activities upstream. Egypt remains adamant that the dam will hurt its water supply and threaten domestic development.

But Sudanese officials appear to have changed their assessment of the impact of the dam. They now see it as a potential regulator of seasonal floods and provider of clean energy.

These issues should be examined thoroughly during the negotiations. The three countries should adopt a treaty or agreement that is mutually acceptable and beneficial.

Over the years, the three countries have struggled to bring meaning to terms like “significant harm” and “equitable and reasonable utilisation”. The final treaty should define these terms. It should also create a mediation mechanism, which can include referring certain specified matters to the International Court of Justice for resolution.

John Mukum Mbaku, Professor, Weber State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Juan: In your devastating post about Iraq’s drought, you could have given more attention to the crucial role of Turkey in flouting international law and damaging Iraq (and Syria) through its illegal capture of the bulk of the water of first the Euphrates and then the Tigris, building very large dams and hundreds of smaller water diversion devices on both rivers.

You might also have mentioned the dams that Iran has built on feeders to the Tigris, especially as they affect the Shatt al-Arab. The building of the Tabqa dam, the Tishrin dam, and other smaller dams in Syria also affected the water supply of Iraq. In the case of the Tabqa Dam, I witnessed personally the kind of disruption such an upstream dam could cause.

In 1974, as Syria began to fill that reservoir (Lake Assad), the water coming down the Euphrates to Iraq was greatly reduced. The Iraqi government made decisions about allocation of the remaining water and, as a result, the Dagharah/Afaq canal, that runs past Nippur (where I was digging at the time), received water only twice a week. This meant that the local farmers did not have enough water to plant and harvest grain, but did have enough for vegetable patches. A local man, who worked for us in the dig house, began to look exhausted and I found out that he was getting up in the middle of the night on those two days to go out and irrigate his fields. He knew that the Syrian dam was causing the problem. I asked him once what would happen if there continued to be tension between Iraq and Syria. He answered: “One will eat the other.”

Image of Euphrates, Iraq by David Mark from Pixabay

Farther south along the canal, the town of Afaq was allotted enough water to survive, but the area farther downstream was not. As a result, 20,000 people (mostly farmers and their families) along that canal were removed and resettled in the rain-fed area north of Baghdad. A couple of years later, when more normal water allocations were resumed, most of the people returned. With the flood of money that resulted from the nationalization of oil, the government took off of the Development Board’s shelves ambitious irrigation plans that had been developed in the 1940s and 50s, based in part on Willcocks’ grand scheme that he created for the Ottomans. To gain some security in water to offset the dams upstream, the Iraqis built dams at Haditha on the Euphrates and at Eski Mosul on the Tigris, and began but did not finish another at the Fatha Gorge.

For the south, the government revived a desalinization project that was designed to flush the salt out of fields and drain the brine into the Third River, which would dump it into a newly created marsh south of Ur and/or into the Gulf. This huge project, designed by an American company and implemented by a Dutch company, was not finished because of the 1958 revolution. When the project was revived in the 1970s, it made great headway, including the cutting of the Third River, but was halted by the beginning of the Iran-Iraq War in 1980. Most important, the key project for the entire country DID see completion–it was meant to offset a situation such as had happened with the filling of the Tabqa. The project connected the Tigris and Euphrates through a deep canal and siphon system just north of Baghdad, making it possible to shift Euphrates water to the Tigris and Tigris water to the Euphrates, as needed.

There was one unfortunate result of this linkage in that, although relief for short-term water crises was assured, there were several years in which too much water was made available and often the canals, including those near Afaq, were running at peak much of the time, allowing farmers to over-irrigate. This resulted in a drastic rise in groundwater, leading to increased salinization of fields. During that period, the marshes grew in size. Gradually, chemicals from agriculture and industry led to increasingly polluted water in Iraq.

By the 1980s, people in the marshes began to say that they tended not to wade in the water because exposure to the water resulted in skin rashes. They noted that fish, frogs, and other animals were showing odd lesions. And they began to witness the diminution of the marshes, as more and more of the water was drawn off and evaporated upstream. In 1988, my last trip to the marshes, the tourist village of Chibayish, where we used to get into boats to see the marshes, was five kilometers from the water.

This had nothing to do with any move by Saddam to drain the marshes, but was just the result of all the extraction upstream, primarily in Turkey. Northern Iraq has had a history of occasional long periods of drought, but the south never had uniform droughts until recently because enough water would come down the rivers to support irrigation, even if reduced.

We know that there were historical periods in which parts of the irrigated zone in the south were abandoned, but other areas still flourished. One of the easily foreseeable results of our current crisis of global warming is the effect of the reduction of snow in the Zagros, which will create massive desertification; we are seeing early effects in the entire system of both rivers, even in Turkey. But the coming disruption in the Tigris-Euphrates basin will appear to be moderate compared to the situation for the billions of people in the countries dependent on the Himalayas.

Mac

(The Conversation) – People once believed the planet could always accommodate us. That the resilience of the Earth system meant nature would always provide. But we now know this is not necessarily the case. As big as the world is, our impact is bigger.

In research released today, an international team of scientists from the Earth Commission, of which we were part, identified eight “safe” and “just” boundaries spanning five vital planetary systems: climate change, the biosphere, freshwater, nutrient use in fertilisers and air pollution. This is the first time an assessment of boundaries has quantified the harms to people from changes to the Earth system.

“Safe” means boundaries maintaining stability and resilience of our planetary systems on which we rely. “Just”, in this work, means boundaries which minimise significant harm to people. Together, they’re a health barometer for the planet.

Assessing our planet’s health is a big task. It took the expertise of 51 world-leading researchers from natural and social sciences. Our methods included modelling, literature reviews and expert judgement. We assessed factors such as tipping point risks, declines in Earth system functions, historical variability and effects on people.

Alarmingly, we found humanity has exceeded the safe and just limits for four of five systems. Aerosol pollution is the sole exception. Urgent action, based on the best available science, is now needed.

So, what did we find?

Our work builds on the influential concepts of planetary boundaries by finding ways to quantify what just systems look like alongside safety.

Importantly, the safe and just boundaries are defined at local to global spatial scales appropriate for assessing and managing planetary systems – as small as one square kilometre in the case of biodiversity. This is crucial because many natural functions act at local scales.

Here are the boundaries:

1. Climate boundary – keep warming to 1℃

We know the Paris Agreement goal of 1.5℃ avoids a high risk of triggering dangerous climate tipping points.

But even now, with warming at 1.2℃, many people around the world are being hit hard by climate-linked disasters, such as the recent extreme heat in China, fires in Canada, severe floods in Pakistan and droughts in the United States and the Horn of Africa.

At 1.5℃, hundreds of millions of people could be exposed to average annual temperatures over 29℃, which is outside the human climate niche and can be fatal. That means a just boundary for climate is nearer to 1°C. This makes the need to halt further carbon emissions even more urgent.

2. Biosphere boundaries: Expand intact ecosystems to cover 50-60% of the earth

A healthy biosphere ensures a safe and just planet by storing carbon, maintaining global water cycles and soil quality, protecting pollinators and many other ecosystem services. To safeguard these services, we need 50 to 60% of the world’s land to have largely intact natural ecosystems.

Recent research puts the current figure at between 45% and 50%, which includes vast areas of land with relatively low populations, including parts of Australia and the Amazon rainforest. These areas are already under pressure from climate change and other human activity.

Image by Rosina Kaiser from Pixabay

Locally, we need about 20-25% of each square kilometre of farms, towns, cities or other human-dominated landscapes to contain largely intact natural ecosystems. At present, only a third of our human-dominated landscapes meet this threshold.

3. Freshwater boundaries: Keep groundwater levels up and don’t suck rivers dry

Too much freshwater is a problem, as unprecedented floods in Australia and Pakistan show. And too little is also a problem, with unprecedented droughts taking their toll on food production.

To bring fresh water systems back into balance, a rule of thumb is to avoid taking or adding more than 20% of a river or stream’s water in any one month, in the absence of local knowledge of environmental flows.

At present, 66% of the world’s land area meets this boundary, when flows are averaged over the year. But human settlement has a major impact: less than half of the world’s population lives in these areas. Groundwater, too, is overused. At present, almost half the world’s land is subject to groundwater overextraction.

4. Fertiliser and nutrient boundaries: Halve the runoff from fertilisers

When farmers overuse fertilisers on their fields, rain washes nitrogen and phosphorus runoff into rivers and oceans. These nutrients can trigger algal blooms, damage ecosystems and worsen drinking water quality.

Yet many farming regions in poorer countries don’t have enough fertiliser, which is unjust.

Worldwide, our nitrogen and phosphorus use are up to double their safe and just boundaries. While this needs to be reduced in many countries, in other parts of the world fertiliser use can safely increase.

5. Aerosol pollution boundary: Sharply reduce dangerous air pollution and reduce regional differences

New research shows differences in concentration of aerosol pollutants between Northern and Southern hemispheres could disrupt wind patterns and monsoons if pollutant levels keep increasing. That is, air pollution could actually upend weather systems.

At present, aerosol concentrations have not yet reached weather-changing levels. But much of the world is exposed to dangerous levels of fine particle pollution (known as PM 2.5) in the air, causing an estimated 4.2 million deaths a year.

We must significantly reduce these pollutants to safer levels – under 15 micrograms per cubic metre of air.

We must act

We must urgently navigate towards a safe and just future, and strive to return our planetary systems back within safe and just boundaries through just means.

To stop human civilisation from pushing the Earths’s systems out of balance, we will have to tackle the many ways we damage the planet.

To work towards a world compatible with the Earth’s limits means setting and achieving science-based targets. To translate these boundaries to actions will require urgent support from government to create regulatory and incentive-based systems to drive the changes needed.

Setting boundaries and targets is vital. The Paris Agreement galvanised faster action on climate. But we need similar boundaries to ensure the future holds fresh water, clean air, a planet still full of life and a good life for humans.

We would like to acknowledge support from the Earth Commission, which is hosted by Future Earth, and is the science component of the Global Commons Alliance

Steven J Lade, Resilience researcher at Australian National University, Australian National University; Ben Stewart-Koster, Senior research fellow, Griffith University; Stuart Bunn, Professor, Australian Rivers Institute, Griffith University; Syezlin Hasan, Research fellow, Griffith University, and Xuemei Bai, Distinguished Professor, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

“Large-scale heavy metal pollution, coastal erosion and seawater intrusion pose an existential threat to the Nile River Delta and endanger 60 million people in Egypt who depend on its resources for every facet of life,” say Egyptian and American experts at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering of the University of Southern California who published their findings in a new study in Earth’s Future.

( The Third Pole) – How would a decolonised water perspective and practice mitigate the effects of the type of floods that Pakistan is witnessing in 2022? If decolonising water is about recentring the multiple layers of meaning and practice that are associated with water at the local and indigenous level, then we have to move beyond the obsession with dams and mega infrastructure projects.

Pakistani water managers (like their counterparts in most of the global South) suffer from an acute case of mega-projectivitis: a deadly disease caused by modernity and a blind commitment to colonial thinking and practices. Much of the extensive infrastructure development in the Indus Basin – including dams, barrages, canals and levees – has served to exacerbate the flood pulses of the basin’s rivers. The colonial engineering paradigm has exchanged high frequency-low intensity events, which were ecologically beneficial, for low frequency-high intensity events which wreak the kind of destruction we are witnessing today in Pakistan.

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I outline below what a decolonised water approach to flood management would be like in Pakistan.

The first and foremost priority for flood management in Pakistan, or anywhere, should be credible, actionable, comprehensible and accurate (as far as possible) early warnings. A colonial water approach would prioritise the accuracy of the models. A decolonial approach would emphasise:

1. The credibility of the warning, by engaging local communities through schools and civil society in data collection and information sharing. The warning system would also learn from vernacular practices of forecasting and experiential meteorology.
2. Actionable practicality, by engaging local communities in vulnerability assessments and floodplain mapping to chart out who can take what action in the event of an emergency, paying particular attention to intersectional gender dynamics.
3. Comprehensibility, by again focusing on conveying timely warnings in jargon-free vernacular languages which are comprehensible to everyone, particularly women and marginalised communities.

Listen to the people who live on the riverbanks

The second priority has to be drainage. Every farmer or even local child knows which way the water flows. They should be listened to, and any obstructions standing in the way of the natural drainage of waterways should be removed. This will not only help mitigate the intensity of the flood peaks, but also the duration of the inundation. Essential infrastructure like roads, railway lines and canals should have culverts, bridges and/or siphons to facilitate natural drainage.

Third, cancel and prevent real estate investments on floodplains, including housing societies, hotels, expressways and so on. Floodplains are best used as parks. And along the same lines, please give some wetlands back to the rivers. One could not hope for a more effective moderator of flood peaks than wetlands. In addition, wetlands have multiple ecological benefits in terms of groundwater recharge, biodiversity conservation and carbon sequestration.

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Fourth, undertake vulnerability mapping exercises for river plain communities in consultation with those communities. Knowing patterns of household and community vulnerability will help target relief and recovery aid in the aftermath of floods to those most in need, instead of the usual pattern of flailing around with inappropriate aid. This could easily be undertaken using some existing vulnerability assessment indices, by for example the irrigation or revenue departments of Pakistan, which have the deepest penetration at the local level in the country.

Fifth, help local communities further reinforce their existing flood adaptation measures, for example building homes and animal pens on elevated platforms. For those who cannot afford to build those shelters, the state should provide conveniently located human and animal shelters. In rural South Asia, people will not evacuate if their animals cannot.

Decentralised governance is the key

Sixth, decentralise governance to local government. The de facto federal but de jure centralised Pakistani state assumes the flood-affected to be helpless victims in need of central government help. Nothing could be further from the truth. People and communities come together, and the first source of help is always local. Work with democratic, empowered local governments who know their surroundings best for flood management and relief. The command-and-control approach perpetuated through the colonial bureaucracy is dysfunctional.

Seventh, prioritise women, gender minorities and marginalised communities as the recipients and administrators of aid. The patriarchal ethos in relief aid distribution only serves to further marginalise women, children and those most in need. Draw upon the strengths and capacities of women, for them to be conduits for articulating needs and disbursing aid.

Find some new textbooks which are not written by dead white men

Eighth, reintroduce geography and environmental sciences in the school curriculums of Pakistan. The forty-year absence of the subjects and their substitute phony history in the name of Pakistan studies has not yielded any more patriotic or enlightened citizens. Instead, they have produced people more ignorant of the challenges that the country is facing. Build a culture of decolonial environmental sensitivity from school onwards.

Handle the secondary hazards

Ninth, do not focus on single hazards. All hazards such as floods have secondary and cascading hazards associated with them. For example, in Karachi the majority of deaths during floods are from electrocution due to poor electricity infrastructure. In rural areas, people die of snake bites and waterborne diseases. Pay attention to and plan for secondary local hazards that actually hurt people. Floods by themselves rarely cause so much direct damage as their secondary consequences.

Lastly, and most importantly, to sum up the essence of all of the above: find some new textbooks which are not written by dead white men, but in fact combine the insights of modern science with experiential local environmental knowledge and cosmologies. Have some faith that the people of Pakistan own their land and water, and are the greatest custodians and scholars of it. Benefit from their wisdom. All you need is some humility and deprogramming of the colonial mindset. Decolonised water is the only hope going forward in a climate-changed present.

This series was initiated through conversations with the Decolonising Geography educators collective and was first published on their website decolonisegeography.com

Editor’s Note: The Indus River and its tributaries are essential for the existence of Pakistan. British engineers built the world’s largest canal irrigation system in Sindh in the lower Indus in the 1840s. Many more dams, barrages, weirs and canals were built after the exit of the British Raj in 1947. The result was that the river’s flow was so disrupted, the Indus did not even reach the sea for many years.

Then came the disastrous floods of 2010, which led to almost 2,000 deaths and exposed how the development model being followed along the Indus was unsustainable. Months after the floods, noted geographer Daanish Mustafa and eminent risk and hazard analyst David Wrathall wrote a detailed critique of the prevailing development model in Pakistan and how it exacerbated damage from the floods. Read their three-part series published in The Third Pole from that time here, here and here.

Mustafa now revisits the topic in a new two-part series in the wake of Pakistan’s devastating 2022 floods, making a fervent plea to policymakers to move away from colonial mindsets on water. Read the first part here.

Via The Third Pole, republished under a Creative Commons license.

( ProPublica) – The western United States is, famously, in the grips of its worst megadrought in a millennium. The Colorado River, which supplies water to more than 40 million Americans and supports food production for the rest of the country, is in imminent peril. The levels in the nation’s largest freshwater reservoir, Lake Mead, behind the Hoover Dam and a fulcrum of the Colorado River basin, have dropped to around 25% of capacity. The Bureau of Reclamation, which governs lakes Mead and Powell and water distribution for the southern end of the river, has issued an ultimatum: The seven states that draw from the Colorado must find ways to cut their consumption — by as much as 40% — or the federal government will do it for them. Last week those states failed to agree on new conservation measures by deadline. Meanwhile, next door, California, which draws from the Colorado, faces its own additional crises, with snowpack and water levels in both its reservoirs and aquifers all experiencing a steady, historic and climate-driven decline.

It’s a national emergency, but not a surprise, as scientists and leaders have been warning for a generation that warming plus overuse of water in a fast-growing West would lead those states to run out.

I recently sat down with Jay Famiglietti, the executive director of the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan, to talk about what comes next and what the public still doesn’t understand about water scarcity in the United States. Before moving to Canada, Famiglietti was a lead researcher at NASA’s water science program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and a member of the faculty at the University of California, Irvine. He pioneered the use of the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites to peer into the earth’s mass and measure changes in its underground water supplies. The Colorado River crisis is urgent, Famiglietti said, but the hidden, underground water crisis is even worse. We talked about what U.S. leaders either won’t acknowledge or don’t understand and about how bad things are about to get.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Let’s start with the Colorado River because it’s in the news. The federal government has put some extraordinary numbers out there, suggesting water users cut between 2 and 4 million acre-feet of water usage starting this year — roughly 40% of the entire river’s recent flow. How could that possibly happen?

It’s going to be really hard. We’re looking at drastically reduced food production and the migration of agriculture to other parts of the country and real limits on growth, especially in desert cities like Phoenix. My fear is that groundwater will, as usual, be left out of the discussion — groundwater is mostly unprotected, and it’s going to be a real shit show.

Remind us how that happens. States and farmers cut back on the Colorado River, and California and Arizona just start pumping all the water out of their aquifers?

Yeah. This started with the drought contingency plan [the 2018 legal agreement among the states on the Colorado River]. Arizona had to cut nearly 20% of its Colorado River water. To placate the farmers, the deal was that they would have free access to the groundwater. In fact, something like $20 million was allocated to help them dig more wells. So, it was just a direct transfer from surface water to groundwater. Right away, you could see that the groundwater depletion was accelerating. With this latest round, I’m afraid we’re just going to see more of that.

Some of that groundwater actually gets used to grow feed for cattle in the Middle East or China, right? There’s Saudi-owned agriculture firms planting alfalfa, which uses more water than just about anything, and it’s not for American food supply. Do I have that right?

There’s been other buyers from other countries coming in, buying up that land, land grabbing and grabbing the water rights. That’s happening in Arizona.

What about in California? Groundwater depletion has caused the earth to sink in on itself. Parts of the Central Valley are 28 feet lower today than they were a century ago.

California passed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act in 2014, which mandated an extraordinarily long time horizon: two years to form the Groundwater Sustainability Agencies and then five years for each GSA to come up with its sustainability plan. So that’s now: 2022. And then 20 years to come into sustainability. My fear is that the slow implementation will allow for too much groundwater depletion to happen. It’s sort of the same old, same old.

But could it work?

I don’t think we’re talking about sustainability. I think we’re talking about managed depletion. Because it’s impossible to keep growing the food that we grow in California. It’s agriculture that uses most of the groundwater. The math just isn’t there to have sustainable groundwater management. If you think of sustainability as input equals output — don’t withdraw more than is being replenished on an annual basis — that’s impossible in most of California.

Will we run out of water? Are we talking about 10 years or 100 years?

Yes. We are on target to. Parts of the Central Valley have already run out of water. Before SGMA, there were places in the southern part of the valley where I would say within 40 to 50 years we would run out or the water is so saline or so deep that it’s just too expensive to extract. SGMA may slow that down — or it may not. I don’t think the outlook is really good. Our own research is showing that groundwater depletion there has accelerated in the last three years.

Then what happens? What does California or Arizona look like after that?

It looks pretty dry. Even among water users, there’s an element that doesn’t understand that this is going to be the end for a lot of farming. Farmers are trying to be really efficient but also magically want the supply of water to be sustained.

We focus on the big cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas, but it’s farms that use 80% of water. They grow crops that provide huge amounts of the winter fruits and vegetables and nuts for the entire country. Is there any way that farming in California and Arizona can continue even remotely close to how it is today?

I don’t think so. It has to drastically change. We’ll need wholesale conversion to efficient irrigation and different pricing structures so that water is better valued. We’ll need different crops that are bred to be more drought tolerant and more saline-water tolerant. And we’ll probably have a lot less production.

What does that mean for the country’s food supply?

This is the big question. I don’t want to be flippant, but people don’t understand the food-water nexus. Do we try to bring more water to the southern high plains, to Arizona, to California, because if the food system’s optimized, maybe that’s the cheapest thing to do? Or does agriculture move to where the water is? Does it migrate north and east? It’s not just food production. What about the workers? Transportation? If we were to move all of our agriculture to northern California, into Idaho, into North Dakota over the next decade, that’s a major upheaval for millions and millions of people who work in the ag industry.

It’s really interconnected, isn’t it? The nation essentially expanded West beginning in the 19th century in order to build a food system that could support East Coast growth. The Homestead Act, the expansion of the railroads, was partially to put a system in place to bring stock back to the meat houses in Chicago and to expand farming to supply the urban growth in the East.

I don’t think a lot of people really realize that, right? When I go to the grocery store in Saskatoon, my berries are coming from Watsonville, California. The lettuce is coming from Salinas, California.

Farmers in the West are fiercely independent. So, in California, Arizona, do they lose the ability to choose what to plant?

Right now, there’s freedom to plant whatever you want. But when we look out a few decades, if the water cannot be managed sustainably, I don’t actually know. At some point we will need discussions and interventions about what are the needs of the country? What kind of food? What do we need for our food security?

Let’s discuss California. Its governor, Gavin Newsom, has advanced a lot of progressive climate policies, but he replaced the water board leader, who pushed for groundwater management across the state, and last month the agency’s long-serving climate change manager resigned in protest of the state’s lax water conservation efforts. What does it mean if a liberal, climate-active governor can’t make the hard decisions? What does that say about the bigger picture?

There has been a drop off from the Jerry Brown administration to the Newsom administration. Water has taken a step lower in priority.

Is that a sign that these problems are intractable?

No. It’s a sign that it’s just not as high a priority. There are tough decisions to be made in California, and some of them won’t be popular. You can see the difference between someone like Brown, who was sort of end-of-career and just like, “Screw it, man, I’m just going to do this because it needs to be done,” and someone like Newsom, who clearly has aspirations for higher office and is making more of a political play. We’re not going to solve California’s water problem, but we could make it a lot more manageable for decades and decades and decades. (Newsom’s office has rejected the criticism and has said the governor is doing more than any other state to adapt to climate change. On Aug. 11 his administration announced new water recycling, storage and conservation measures.)

Water wars. It’s an idea that gets batted around a whole bunch. Once, negotiating water use more than a century ago, California and Arizona amassed armed state guard troops on opposite banks of the Colorado River. Is this hyperbole or reality for the future?

Well, it’s already happening. Florida and Georgia were in court as was Tennessee. There’s the dispute between Texas and New Mexico. Even within California they’re still arguing environment versus agriculture, farmers versus fish, north versus south. Sadly, we’re at a point in our history where people are not afraid to express their extreme points of view in ways that are violent. That’s the trajectory that we’re on. When you put those things together, especially in the southern half or the southwestern United States, I think it’s more of a tinderbox than it ever has been.

That’s hopeful.

You’re not going to get any hope out of me. The best you’re going to get out of me is we can manage our way through. I don’t think we’re going to really slow global change. We have to do what we’re doing because we’re talking about the future. But a certain number of degrees warming and a certain amount of sea level rise is already locked in, and all that’s happening in our lifetimes. The best you’re going to hear from me is that we need to do the best we can now to slow down the rates of warming that directly impacts the availability of water. We’re talking about the future of humanity. I think people don’t realize that we’re making those decisions now by our water policies and by our climate change policy.

When people think about water, they think of it as a Western problem, but there’s water shortages across the High Plains and into the South, too.

I don’t think most people understand that scarcity in many places is getting more pronounced. Nationally, let’s look at the positives: It’s a big country, and within its boundaries, we have enough water to be water secure and to be food secure and to do it in an environmentally sustainable way. A lot of countries don’t have that. That’s a positive, though we still have the same problems that everyone else has with increasing flooding and drought. What I really think we need is more attention to a national water policy and more attention to the food, water and energy nexus. Because those are things that are going to define how well we do as a country.

What would a national water policy look like?

It recognizes where people live, and it recognizes where we have water, and then it decides how we want to deal with that. Maybe it’s more like a national water/food policy. Moving water over long distances is not really feasible right now — it’s incredibly expensive. Does the government want to subsidize that? These are the kind of things that need to be discussed, because we’re on a collision course with reality — and the reality is those places where we grow food, where a lot of people live, are running out of water, and there are other parts of the country that have a lot of water. So that’s a national-level discussion that has to happen, because when you think about it, the food problem is a national problem. It’s not a California problem. It’s not a Southern, High Plains, Ogallala, Texas Panhandle problem. It’s a national problem. It needs a national solution.

Is this a climate czar? A new agency?

Something like that. We’re failing right now. We’re failing to have any vision for how that would happen. In Canada, we’re talking about a Canadian water agency and a national water policy. That could be something that we need in the United States — a national water agency to deal with these problems.

In the Inflation Reduction Act we finally have some legislation that will help cut emissions. There’s plenty of other talk about infrastructure and adaptation — seawalls and strengthening housing and building codes and all of those sorts of things. Where would you rank the priority of a national water policy?

It’s an absolute top priority. I like to say that water’s next, right after carbon. Water is the messenger that’s delivering the bad news about climate change to your city, to your front door.

We don’t usually mix concern over drought with concern over contamination, but there was a recent study about the presence of “forever” chemicals in rainfall and salt washing off the roads in Washington, D.C., and contaminating drinking water. Can these remain separate challenges in a hotter future?

It doesn’t get discussed much, but we’re seeing more and more the links between water quality and climate change. We’ve got water treatment facilities and sewers close to coasts. During drought, discharge of contaminants is less diluted. The water quality community and the water climate communities don’t really overlap. We’ve done a terrible job as stewards where water is concerned.

Globally, what do you want Americans to think about when they read this?

The United States is kind of a snapshot of what’s happening in the rest of the world. There’s no place we can run to. Things are happening really, really fast and in a very large scale. We as a society, as a country or as a global society are not responding with the urgency, with the pace and the scale that’s required. I am specifically talking about rapid changes that are happening with freshwater availability that most people don’t know about. The problems are often larger than one country. A lot of it is transboundary. And we’re just not moving fast enough.

News flash.

Around the world the water levels have just continued to drop. In the Middle East or India. In fact, they’re getting faster. It’s actually a steeper slope.

So, the Colorado River is the least of our worries.

Globally? It’s not even as bad as the others. Arizona doesn’t really show up as much compared to some of these places.

Abrahm Lustgarten is an environmental reporter, with a focus at the intersection of business, climate and energy. He is currently covering changes at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and working on a project about pollution at U.S. Defense sites.

Via ProPublica