Researchers warn Great Salt Lake’s retreat threatens crucial ecosystem, public health

January 8, 2023 / activist360

Great Salt Lake Desert, Utah, USA by Urvish Prajapati on Unsplash — *Great Salt Lake Desert, Utah by Urvish Prajapati on Unsplash*

“The lake’s ecosystem is not only on the edge of collapse. It is collapsing,” said one ecologist.

Scientists are warning Utah officials that the Great Salt Lake is shrinking far faster than experts previously believed, and calling for a major reduction in water consumption across the American West in order to prevent the lake from disappearing in the next five years.

Researchers at Brigham Young University (BYU) led more than 30 scientists from 11 universities and advocacy groups in a report released this week showing that the lake is currently at 37% of its former volume, with its rapid retreat driven by the historic drought that’s continuing across the West.

Amid the climate crisis-fueled megadrought, the continued normal consumption of water in Utah and its neighboring states has led the Great Salt Lake to lose 40 billion gallons of water per year since 2020, reducing its surface level to 10 feet below what is considered the minimum safe level.

“Goodbye, Great Salt Lake,” tweeted the Environmental Defense Fund on Friday.

Goodbye, Great Salt Lake👋 Megadrought and mismanagement have cost the lake 73% of its water. Now experts are warning it could dry up in the next 5 years. And “Its disappearance could cause immense damage to Utah’s public health, environment, and economy”https://t.co/oecZ0qQ8C0
— EDF (@EnvDefenseFund) January 6, 2023

Scientists previously have warned that increased average temperatures in Utah—where it is now about 4°F warmer than it was in the early 1900s—are to blame for a 9% reduction in the amount of water flowing into the lake from streams.

The authors of the BYU study are calling on Utah officials to authorize water releases from the state’s reservoirs and cut water consumption by at least a third and as much as half to allow 2.5 million acre feet of water to reach the lake and prevent the collapse of its ecosystem as well as human exposure to dangerous sediments.

“This is a crisis,” BYU ecologist Ben Abbott, a lead author of the report, told The Washington Post. “The ecosystem is on life support, [and] we need to have this emergency intervention to make sure it doesn’t disappear.”

The shrinking of the Great Salt Lake has already begun creating a new ecosystem that is toxic for the shrimp and flies that make it their habitat, due to the lack of freshwater flowing in. That has endangered millions of birds that stop at the lake as they migrate each year.

The loss of the lake may also already be exposing about 2.5 million people to sediments containing mercury, arsenic, and other toxins.

“Nanoparticles of dust have potential to cause just as much harm if they come from dry lake bed as from a tailpipe or a smokestack,” Brian Moench, president of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, told the Post. Last month, Moench’s group applauded as Republican Gov. Spencer Cox’s administration, under pressure from residents, walked back its position supporting a plan to allow a magnesium company to pump water from the Great Salt Lake.

Abbott called the rapid shrinking of the lake “honestly jaw-dropping.”

“The lake’s ecosystem is not only on the edge of collapse. It is collapsing,” Abbott told CNN. “The lake is mostly lakebed right now.”

What is a wetland? An ecologist explains

October 2, 2022 / activist360

By Jon Sweetman, The Conversation US CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Wetlands are areas of land that are covered by water, or have flooded or waterlogged soils. They can have water on them either permanently or for just part of the year.

Whether it’s year-round or seasonal, this period of water saturation produces hydric soils, which contain little or no oxygen. But this doesn’t mean that they are lifeless: Wetlands are full of unique water-loving plants and wildlife that have adapted to wet environments.

Wetlands can take many different forms, depending on the local climate, water conditions and land forms and features. For example, swamps are dominated by woody trees or shrubs. Marshes often have more grasslike plants, such as cattails and bulrushes. Bogs and fens are areas that accumulate peat – deposits of dead and partly decomposed plant materials that form organic-rich soil.

Trillions of dollars in ecological benefits

Wetlands are important environments for many reasons. They provide ecological services whose value has been estimated to be worth more than US$47 trillion per year.

For example, wetlands support very high levels of biodiversity. Scientists estimate that 40% of all species on Earth live or breed in wetlands.

Wetlands are critical homes or stopovers for many species of migratory birds. In the central U.S. and Canada, for example, wetlands in the so-called prairie pothole region on the Great Plains support up to three-quarters of North America’s breeding ducks.

The hunting and conservation group Ducks Unlimited works to conserve prairie pothole wetlands on North America’s Great Plains.

Along with providing important habitat for everything from microbes to frogs to waterfowl, wetlands also work to improve water quality. They can capture surface runoff from cities and farmlands and work as natural water filters, trapping excess nutrients that otherwise might create dead zones in lakes and bays. Wetlands can also help remove other pollutants and trap suspended sediments that cloud water bodies, which can kill aquatic plants and animals.

Because wetlands are often in low-lying areas of the landscape, they can store and slowly release surface water. Wetlands can be extremely important for reducing the impacts of flooding. In some places, water entering wetlands can also recharge groundwater aquifers that are important for irrigation and drinking water.

Wetlands also act as important carbon sinks. As wetland plants grow, they remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They they die, sink to the bottom of the wetland and decompose very slowly.

Over time, the carbon they contain accumulates in wetland soils, where it can be stored for hundreds of years. Conserving and restoring wetlands is an important strategy for regulating greenhouse gases and mitigating the impacts of climate change.

Resources at risk

Despite the many valuable services they provide, wetlands are constantly being destroyed by draining them or filling them in, mainly for farming and development. Since 1970, the planet has lost 35% of its wetlands, a rate three times faster than the loss of forests.

Destruction and degradation of wetlands has led to the loss of many organisms that rely on wetland habitat, including birds, amphibians, fish, mammals and many insects. As one example, many dragonfly and damselfly species are declining worldwide as the freshwater wetlands where they breed are drained and filled in. A marsh or bog may not look like a productive place, but wetlands teem with life and are critically important parts of our environment.

Disclosure statement
Jon Sweetman receives funding from the US EPA for work on wetland restoration. He is affiliated with the Society for Freshwater Science, the Ecological Society of America, and the Society of Wetland Scientists

Inside global water-conflict hotspots

March 27, 2022 / activist360

*Water in well. Source: Suhasajgaonkar, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons*

By Bob Koigi, FairPlanet (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).

For thousands of years, bodies of water have been attractions around which the very first civilizations formed, offering people fresh drinking and irrigation water; however, due to their high value and scarcity, they have also been sources of contention, creating competition among communities and countries. Today, as climate change threatens the global supply of water, these conflicts are more pronounced in certain areas, escalating in disunity and violence.

As global water supplies dwindle, occasioned by unprecedented population growth, poor governance, weak infrastructure, climate change and pollution, among other factors, nations and citizens are rising against each other in the fight for the scarce and necessary resource, inducing experts, including UN Secretary Generals, to posit that future wars will be fought over water rather than oil.

Transboundary water conflagrations have redefined foreign relations in the 20th century: from Iran, which has for years been engaged in protracted clashes with Afghanistan over the sharing of the Helmand River’s waters, to Pakistan’s conflict with India that dates back to the 1960s due to the waters of the Indus River – used as a weapon of war in the dispute over Kashmir -, as well as the clash between Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan over the construction of the Grand Renaissance Dam that will store 10 million cubic metres of water, and the intermittent clashes between muslim Fulani herders and christian farmers in Nigeria over lack of rain and pasture.

Indeed, in 2017, water was attributed as a key factor in conflicts in over 45 countries.

Water-conflict hotspots

There are an estimated 260 transboundary bodies of waters – lakes, rivers and aquifers that are shared by two or more nations – which supply water to over 2 billion people. They have been sources of livelihood, but have also had large roles in shaping inter-state and global geopolitics.

According to a water conflict chronology, a breakdown of the 925 water conflicts that go back 5,000 years, a large share of water wars are related to agriculture due to the fact that the sector accounts for 70 percent of freshwater use.

“The instability and conflicts associated with water have ripple effects that have shaped international relations and altered how we live. Key among them are migration and the emergence of water refugees,” said Fatma Abdalla, a water and environmental activist. “These developments are likely to become more pronounced going forward as the effects of climate change become more intense and supplies dwindle. It is a nightmare that governments and the international community haven’t given much thought to, but urgently should.”

Sustainable water agreements

However, even with water’s destabilising potential, there have been concerted efforts to arrest the runaway situation. From 1948, over 200 international water agreements have been negotiated and signed, among them the UNECE Water Convention, which spells out the framework for transboundary water cooperation globally. Others include the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 between Pakistan and India and the Global Water Convention on Transboundary Rivers and Lakes, chaperoned by the United Nations, which includes the commitments of 43 countries.

“Now more than ever, there needs to be cooperation and a shared framework among sectors that are heavily dependent on water, such as energy, sanitation, agriculture, navigation and industry in order to have a harmonised and sustainable approach to address the biting water shortage,” argues Jessica Rotich, a Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) expert. “Governments, private sectors and development agencies must therefore work together to streamline a workable formula.”

It is a statement corroborated by the Water, Peace and Security Partnership, WRI and the Pacific Institute who, through a report dubbed Ending Conflicts over Water: Solutions to Water and Security Challenges, highlighted a series of strategies that are crucial to taming water-based conflicts – among them political and legal implementations, policy and governance strategies, economic and financial tools and science and engineering approaches.

Tech to the rescue

Technology has also been at the forefront of tackling water-related conflicts with great results. The Water, Peace and Security (WPS) partnership, a coalition of six European and American NGOs, has come up with Global Early Warning Tool, that bets on machine learning to predict conflicts before they arise by combining data on population density, droughts, flooding, crop failure, and rainfall among other data sources to highlight conflict warnings. The hotspots are displayed in a red-and-orange Mercator projection and are narrowed down to the administrative districts. The tool has identified 2,000 prospective conflict zones with an accuracy rate of 86 percent.

“As factors that drive instability and conflict become more pronounced and water now starts being used as a tool of war and terrorism, which may ultimately create failed states, there has to be a change in our way of doing things,” Abdalla advocated. “We have to bring everyone onboard in conservation efforts, boosting investment in water initiatives, embracing innovations that deliver payoffs and supporting entrepreneurs who have dedicated themselves to saving our planet thanks to their innovative initiatives.”