Tag: Water

Inside global water-conflict hotspots

/ activist360
Water in well. Source: Suhasajgaonkar, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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.”

 

Living near fracking sites linked to higher risk of early death: Study

/ activist360 / Leave a comment
Fracking Site in Warren Center, PA, August 23 2013, Source: Fracking Lawyer, Ostroff Law
Fracking Site in Warren Center, PA, August 23, 2013, Source: Fracking Lawyer, Ostroff Law, (CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons).

Harvard researchers provide further evidence that, as one environmental advocate has said, “fracking is inherently hazardous to the health and safety of people and communities in proximity to it.”

By Kenny Stancil, Common Dreams (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Elderly individuals who live near or downwind of fracking and other “unconventional” drilling operations are at higher risk of early death compared with seniors who don’t live in close proximity to such sites, according to a new study out Thursday from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Airborne contaminants from more than 2.5 million oil and gas wells across the U.S., researchers wrote in a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Energy, are contributing to increased mortality among people 65 and older residing in neighborhoods close to or downwind from what is called unconventional oil and gas development (UOGD)—extraction methods that include directional (non-vertical) drilling and hydraulic fracturing.

“Although UOGD is a major industrial activity in the U.S., very little is known about its public health impacts,” Petros Koutrakis, professor of environmental sciences and one of the paper’s co-authors, said in a statement. “Our study is the first to link mortality to UOGD-related air pollutant exposures.”

Co-author Francesca Dominici, professor of biostatistics, population, and data science, added that “there is an urgent need to understand the causal link between living near or downwind of UOGD and adverse health effects.”

Earlier research, the Harvard Chan School acknowledged in its press release, has “found connections between UOGD activities and increased human exposure to harmful substances in both air and water, as well as connections between UOGD exposure and adverse prenatal, respiratory, cardiovascular, and carcinogenic health outcomes. But little was known about whether exposure to UOGD was associated with mortality risk in the elderly, or about exactly how exposure to UOGD-related activities may be contributing to such risk.”

To find out more, a team of 10 scholars analyzed a cohort of nearly 15.2 million Medicare beneficiaries living in all of the nation’s major UOGD exploration regions from 2001 to 2015. They also examined data collected from more than 2.5 million oil and gas wells.

For each Medicare recipient’s ZIP code and year in the cohort, researchers calculated what pollutant exposures would be if one lived close to UOGD operations, downwind of them, or both, while adjusting for socioeconomic, environmental, and demographic factors.

The closer people lived to fracked gas and other unconventional wells, the greater their risk of premature mortality, researchers found.

According to the Harvard Chan School’s summary of the study:

Those who lived closest to wells had a statistically significant elevated mortality risk (2.5% higher) compared with those who didn’t live close to wells. The study also found that people who lived near UOGD wells as well as downwind of them were at higher risk of premature death than those living upwind, when both groups were compared with people who were unexposed.

“Our findings suggest the importance of considering the potential health dangers of situating UOGD near or upwind of people’s homes,” said Longxiang Li, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Environmental Health and lead author of the study.

The new study adds to a growing body of literature linking fossil fuels to negative health outcomes. In a recent report, the World Health Organization warned that burning coal, oil, and gas is “causing millions of premature deaths every year through air pollutants, costing the global economy billions of dollars annually, and fueling the climate crisis.”

Another recent study estimated that eliminating greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 would save 74 million lives this century. Despite mounting evidence of the deadly toll of fossil fuels, President Joe Biden has yet to use his executive authority to cancel nearly two dozen fracked gas export projects that are set to unleash pollution equivalent to roughly 400 new coal-fired power plants.

So-called unconventional drilling practices have grown rapidly over the past decade, becoming the most common form of extraction in the U.S. As of 2015, the Harvard Chan School pointed out, “more than 100,000 UOGD land-based wells were drilled using directional drilling combined with fracking,” and “roughly 17.6 million U.S. residents currently live within one kilometer of at least one active well.”

Fracking threatens every person on the planet, directly or indirectly. It should be banned entirely.

—Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch
Oil rig, ~12219-12999 Macon Road, Saline Township, Michigan, June 22, 2012. Source: Dwight Burdette, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Oil rig, ~12219-12999 Macon Road, Saline Township, Michigan, June 22, 2012. Source: Dwight Burdette, (CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons).

In contrast to conventional oil and gas drilling, methods such as fracking require “larger volumes of water, proppants (sand or other materials used to keep hydraulic fractures open), and chemicals,” the Harvard Chan School noted.

Last summer, Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) uncovered internal records revealing that since 2012, fossil fuel corporations have injected potentially carcinogenic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), or chemicals that can degrade into PFAS, into the ground while fracking for oil and gas—after former President Barack Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency approved their use despite agency scientists’ concerns about toxicity.

At the time, Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, called the PSR report “alarming,” and said it “confirms what hundreds of scientific studies and thousands of pages of data have already shown over the last decade: fracking is inherently hazardous to the health and safety of people and communities in proximity to it.”

“This says nothing of the dreadful impact fossil fuel extraction and burning is having on our runaway climate crisis. Fracking threatens every person on the planet, directly or indirectly,” said Hauter. “It should be banned entirely.”

Natural Resources Necessary to Feed World Are at a ‘Breaking Point,’ Warns FAO

/ activist360 / Leave a comment
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

“Taking care of land, water, and particularly the long-term health of soils is fundamental to accessing food in an ever-demanding food chain.”

By Jessica Corbett, Common Dreams (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

A United Nations report released Thursday detailing humanity’s degradation of natural resources warns swift and sweeping reforms are needed to keep feeding the growing global population.

“The pressures on land and water ecosystems are now intense, and many are stressed to a critical point.”

The new U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report argues that “a sense of urgency needs to prevail over a hitherto neglected area of public policy and human welfare, that of caring for the long-term future of land, soil, and water.”

“Taking care of land, water, and particularly the long-term health of soils,” the publication explains, “is fundamental to accessing food in an ever-demanding food chain, guaranteeing nature-positive production, advancing equitable livelihoods, and building resilience to shocks and stresses arising from natural disasters and pandemics.”

Entitled The State of the World’s Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture: Systems at breaking point (SOLAW 2021), the report declares that “time is of the essence.”

That tone is echoed by FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu in a foreword to the report, which he says provides “evidence of the changing and alarming trends in resource use.”

“The pressures on land and water ecosystems are now intense, and many are stressed to a critical point,” Qu writes. “It is clear our future food security will depend on safeguarding our land, soil, and water resources.”

Already, human-induced soil degradation affects 34% of land used for food while water scarcity threatens 3.2 billion people—nearly half the total human population—in agricultural areas, according to SOLAW 2021.

Alongside its broad warning that “the interconnected systems of land, soil, and water are stretched to the limit,” the report emphasizes that “current patterns of agricultural intensification are not proving sustainable,” and “farming systems are becoming polarized,” with an “increasing concentration of land under a relatively small number of large commercial farming enterprises.”

Recognizing the need to better manage and safeguard land and water resources essential for food production, the report offers four key takeaways:

  • Land and water governance has to be more inclusive and adaptive;
  • Integrated solutions need to be planned at all levels if they are to be taken to scale;
  • Technical and managerial innovation can be targeted to address priorities and accelerate transformation; and
  • Agricultural support and investment can be redirected towards social and environmental gains derived from land and water management.

“Current patterns of agrifood production are not proving sustainable,” Qu said Thursday at the report’s launch event. “Yet, agrifood systems can play a major role in alleviating these pressures and contributing positively to climate and development goals.”

In his foreword, Qu notes that “a meaningful engagement with the key stakeholders—farmers, pastoralists, foresters, and smallholders—directly involved in managing soils and conserving water in agricultural landscapes is central.”

“These are nature’s stewards and the best agents of change to adopt, adapt, and embrace the innovation we need to secure a sustainable future,” he adds.

Some of those same stakeholders have been critical of the U.N. agency in recent months.

A coalition of food justice advocates last week sent a letter to Qu calling on the FAO to cut ties with CropLife International, warning that any collaboration with the agrochemical trade association “undercuts your agency’s critical—and urgently needed—support for agroecology, which FAO itself notes ‘can support food production and food security and nutrition while restoring the ecosystem services and biodiversity that are essential for sustainable agriculture.'”

Earlier this year, the FAO leader’s remarks at the U.N. Food Systems Summit were among those flagged by justice campaigners as evidence that the September event was “paving the way for greater control of big corporations over global food systems and misleading the people through corporate-led false solutions.”

Just before the summit, during a counter-mobilization, Razan Zuayter of the People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty had said that “food systems can be transformed through the respect of food sovereignty via the will of landless peasants, small farmers, and fishers.”

“We have shown that the people are hungry for real change,” Zuayter added, “and are willing to do whatever it takes to fight for and reclaim their land, their rights, and the future of food systems.”