The environment and interior ministries in Peru have announced plans to set up a special task force to safeguard forests and monitor the rivers in the Amazon basin. The special force will be made up of around 3,000 officers to be known as the Environment Police.
To prevent toxic runoff from flowing down storm drains and into the rivers or ocean, Washington hopes to ban washing cars in driveways throughout the state.While residents complain that washing cars is a family pastime that they should not be required to give up, officials say that the at-home car wash is too harmful to the environment to ignore. “I understand this is something people have done for a long time,” said Bill Moore, a water specialist with the Washington State Department of Ecology, which enacted the ban. “It’s not something we should be doing any longer.”
After two failed attempts, New York City has installed a new-and-improved aluminum alloy turbine in the East River, the only of its kind in the United States.The turbine is the first of 300 which the city hopes to install in the waterway. Unlike the typical river which flows in a constant direction, the East River is a tidal straight with strong, fluctuating currents which allow for more efficient power generation. Once in place, the system could provide electricity to 10,000 households.
By Lester R. Brown
With water shortages emerging as a constraint on food production growth, the world needs an effort to raise water productivity similar to the one that nearly tripled land productivity during the last half of the twentieth century. Worldwide, average irrigation water productivity is now roughly 1 kilogram of grain per ton of water used. Since it takes 1,000 tons of water to produce 1 ton of grain, it is not surprising that 70 percent of world water use is devoted to irrigation. Thus, raising irrigation efficiency is central to raising water productivity overall.
In surface water projects—that is, dams that deliver water to farmers through a network of canals—crop usage of irrigation water never reaches 100 percent simply because some irrigation water evaporates, some percolates downward, and some runs off. Water policy analysts Sandra Postel and Amy Vickers found that “surface water irrigation efficiency ranges between 25 and 40 percent in India, Mexico, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Thailand; between 40 and 45 percent in Malaysia and Morocco; and between 50 and 60 percent in Israel, Japan, and Taiwan.” Irrigation water efficiency is affected not only by the type and condition of irrigation systems but also by soil type, temperature, and humidity. In hot arid regions, the evaporation of irrigation water is far higher than in cooler humid regions.
In 2004, China’s Minister of Water Resources Wang Shucheng outlined for me plans to raise China’s irrigation efficiency from 43 percent in 2000 to 51 percent in 2010 and then to 55 percent in 2030. The steps he described included raising the price of water, providing incentives for adopting more irrigation-efficient technologies, and developing the local institutions to manage this process. Reaching these goals, he felt, would assure China’s future food security.
Urbanization, growing slums, intensive farming, damming, and warring political ideologies are just a few of the hurdles that researchers from Helsinki University of Technology will need to overcome to protect the Mekong River, one of the most important water sources in Southeast Asia.
Luckily, they have a plan. To save the river, researchers have developed what they are calling the ‘3E principle’: the idea that “waters should be used to provide economic well-being to the people, without compromising social equity and environmental sustainability.”
Putting this principle into practice means working closely with each of the countries that benefits from the Mekong River (China and Tibet, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam) to safeguard the river’s life-giving water.
There is no consensus among water analysts on whether there will be global wars over water ownership.
According to UNESCO, globally there are 262 international river basins: 59 in Africa, 52 in Asia, 73 in Europe, 61 in Latin America and the Caribbean and 17 in North America — overall, 145 countries have territories that include at least one shared river basin.
UNESCO states that between 1948 and 1999, there have been 1,831 “international interactions” recorded, including 507 conflicts, 96 neutral or non-significant events and, most importantly, 1,228 instances of cooperation around water-related issues.
As a result, some experts argue that the idea of water wars is rather farfetched given the precedent of water cooperation that has been exhibited by many of the countries around the world.
“Despite the potential problem, history has demonstrated that cooperation, rather than conflict, is likely in shared basins,” says UNESCO.
Look for your swimsuit!
Sunday 6th of July Italy will participate for the third time to the “Big Jump“, a campaign by European Rivers Network (ERN) to inspire a reconciliation of people with their rivers.
The Italian NGO “Legambiente” has organized many events to celebrate this national meeting on the Po River, the country’s longest river (405 miles long). The Po’s waters flow through the Val Padana, the plain that stretches across northern Italy from the French border on the west to the Adriatic Sea on the east. Many Italians live in this fertile expanse, some of the most heavily cultivated land in Europe: here is located the city of Turin, headquarters of Fiat, the automotive conglomerate, and some of the country’s most beautiful and historic towns.
So reads The Daily Telegraph this week. Who said that environmental journalism can be dull?
The invader in question is the American Signal Crayfish (pictured), described as a six inch long killing machine and voracious predator that has already annihilated the native White Claw species, and now threatens to completely overwhelm many fragile aquatic eco-systems.
The problems started during the 1970’s when Signal crayfish bread in farms for the restaurant trade managed to escape. So successful have they been, with their lack of natural predators, rapid breeding rate, and willingness to eat absolutely everything including plants, insects, fish, snails, detritus and their own young, that they have quickly grown into an aquatic army of almost plague proportions.
Trout Are Made of Trees, written by April Pulley Sayre and illustrated by Kate Endle, is the story of how a river’s ecosystem works together for the benefit of the trout. From leaves falling from the trees to trout hatchlings growing up in a stream, this book emphasizes the natural cycle of a trout.
In fall, trees let go of leaves,
which swirl and twirl
and slip into streams.
They ride in a rush
above rocks
and over rapids.
They snag and settle soggily down.
Bacteria feed on the leaves.
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