GET WET!

(Reuters) -Emergency crews labored around the clock on Monday to prevent the collapse of a wastewater reservoir’s leaky containment wall near Tampa Bay, Florida, making steady progress after officials warned of an imminent threat of flooding over the weekend.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers worked with local public safety teams to drain the Piney Point reservoir, which holds about 480 million gallons, in a bid to prevent a major breach that could unleash a cascade of wastewater into the surrounding area, officials said.

While the pumping operation appeared to diminish the immediate threat to hundreds of homes near Piney Point, a former phosphate plant, the wastewater drainage was being discharged to a nearby Gulf Coast seaport, posing environmental concerns there.

The crisis began over the weekend when a worsening week-old leak in the containment wall prompted authorities to order the evacuation of more than 300 dwellings, with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis declaring a local state of emergency on Saturday.

Authorities said they were particularly concerned that tall stacks of phosphogypsum waste, an industrial byproduct from fertilizer manufacturing, might suddenly collapse and be swept into adjacent communities.

Crews from the state Environmental Protection Department and Army Corps of Engineers teamed up on Monday to “reassess the stability of that wall and a second breach that we might have found,” Jacob Saur, direct of public safety for Manatee County, said in a video statement.

Nevertheless, he and acting county administrator Scott Hopes said the imminent flood threat had eased on Monday as expanded pumping operations lowered the volume of the reservoir, reducing stress on the containment structure holding back the wastewater.

“By the end of the day today when the additional pumps come online, we will more than double the volume of water that we’re pulling out of that retention pool,” Hopes said at a news conference. Just under 300 million gallons remained as of midday Monday, he said, adding that crews were looking to drain an additional “75 to 100 million gallons a day.”

Wastewater from the property, owned a company called HRK Holdings, was being pumped into Port Manatee at the mouth of Tampa Bay, raising concerns that the nutrient-dense discharge could spawn algal blooms toxic to marine life in the estuary.

“The biggest concern from our standpoint right now is the amount of nutrients being loaded into the lower Tampa Bay,” Ed Sherwood, executive director of the Tampa Bay Estuary Program, told radio station WMNF on Sunday. “This event, in probably five to 10 days, is introducing the amount of nutrients into the bay that we would want to see over an entire year.”  

U.S. Representative Vern Buchanan, a Republican who represents Florida’s 16th district, told reporters on Monday that reducing possible ecological harm from the draining was a top priority and that the Environmental Protection Agency was working with local agencies to monitor and mitigate the situation.

“Just the fact that we’re running water into the Tampa Bay is not a great thing,” Buchanan said. “But the reality of it is, it seems like it’s the right thing to do right now.”

FOR MORE INFORMATION: https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2021-04-05/crews-scramble-to-drain-waste-water-reservoir-on-brink-of-collapse-in-tampa-bay

(Reuters) – Evacuation orders were lifted on Tuesday for hundreds of residents near Tampa Bay in Florida as crews relieved pressure on the containment wall surrounding a leaky wastewater reservoir, reducing the threat of a toxic flash flood.

Residents and local businesses were permitted to return after data from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers showed a diminished risk of a catastrophic collapse at the site of the former Piney Point phosphate plant.

The Army Corps and local public safety crews have worked around the clock for days pumping hundreds of millions of gallons of water out of the reservoir to ease pressure on its weakened containment wall.

The crisis began last Thursday when officials discovered leaks in the structure, lined with tall stacks of phosphogypsum waste, an industrial byproduct from fertilizer manufacturing known to emit radon, a cancer-causing radioactive gas.

State environmental officials have said tests of water seeping from the reservoir showed it was not radioactive.

But local authorities nevertheless said they feared that an all-out, uncontrolled breach of the wall could unleash a 20-foot torrent of untreated wastewater into the surrounding area, and they ordered a mandatory evacuation of more than 300 nearby homes as a precaution over the weekend.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis declared a local state of emergency on Saturday.

“We’re now ending our fifth day since learning of a breach at the site, and I am in awe over the state, federal and local cooperation to ensure the safety of our residents,” Manatee County Commission Chairman Vanessa Baugh said in a statement announcing the lifting of the evacuation.

While the pumping operation eased the threat to homes and businesses adjacent to the reservoir, the wastewater drainage was being routed into a nearby Gulf Coast seaport, posing environmental concerns there.

Ed Sherwood, executive director of the Tampa Bay Estuary Program, said pumping the nutrient-dense discharge into Port Manatee at the mouth of Tampa Bay could spawn algal blooms toxic to marine life in the estuary.

FOR MORE INFORMATION: https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2021-04-06/florida-evacuations-order-lifted-as-danger-from-leaky-wastewater-reservoir-fades

As the source of most of the water we drink and a place where we often go to recreate and enjoy nature, streams represent a crucial point-of-contact between human beings and the environment.

Now researchers in the College of Natural Resources and Environment and the Department of Biological Systems Engineering are using stream quality data to find new insights into the interactions between the health of our natural spaces and human well-being.

Their findings, published in the journal Ecological Indicators, reveal that demographics such as race and population density, as well as health indices such as cancer rates and food insecurity, show strong correlations with water quality across the Commonwealth of Virginia.

“We started off wanting to explore the general, intuitive relationship between human well-being and ecosystem health,” explained Paul Angermeier, professor in the Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation and assistant unit leader of the Virginia Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit for the U.S. Geological Survey. “Many of us intuit that healthy ecosystems produce benefits that accrue to people, but that outcome isn’t well documented in a quantitative way.”

To document that relationship, the research team had to break from the environmental quality management processes that too often separate the natural world from human experiences.

“When we consider natural resources, we tend to think about whether we’re managing an environment for nonhuman considerations or human ones,” said Associate Professor Leigh-Anne Krometis, of the Department of Biological Systems Engineering, which is in both the College of Engineering and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. “For instance, at the state level we have a department of environmental quality and a department of health, which both deal with the subject of water quality, but in different ways. What we wanted to see was how those two perspectives converge.”

To find correlations across the state, the researchers used two key data sets: water quality measurements provided by the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality and county-level demographics data from the U.S. Census Bureau. They considered 13 indicators of human well-being, four demographic metrics, and two indicators of stream health.

“We had large data sets that we had to organize and process,” explained Professor Marc Stern of the Department of Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation. “Our expectations on finding meaningful relationships between stream health and human factors weren’t that high. The fact that they showed up so distinctly was a surprise.”

What the researchers found is that there is a strong correlation between ecosystem health and human demographics, particularly along the lines of race. Stream conditions were found to be better in counties with higher percentages of white residents. More polluted streams were correlated with higher degrees of overall mortality.

“The term environmental justice is important to bring into our discussion,” noted Stern, a senior fellow in the Center for Leadership in Global Sustainability. “These findings relate to the broader issue of systemic prejudices and the reality that our institutions and social systems do not favor marginalized communities. They get caught up in a cycle of being left behind, and while it’s not impossible to break that pattern, it’s going to take work.”

Virginia is a suitable microcosm for revealing such dimensions: the state has high-density urban cities, suburban and rural areas, coastal and mountain geographies, and a broad socio-economic diversity that make it a useful starting point for broader research into the subject of human-environment interactions.

A crucial next step for the researchers is understanding how people are interacting with natural environments.

“We still don’t have hard data on how people are interacting with nature,” said Angermeier, who, along with Krometis, is an affiliate of Virginia Tech’s Global Change Center housed in the Fralin Life Sciences Institute. “For instance, we found that mortality rates for people are correlated with contamination levels in fish. What does that mean? Are people eating contaminated fish, are they merely sharing a polluted water source, or is it something else? A better understanding of the mechanisms by which people are interacting with water will help us draw clearer conclusions about health outcomes.”

The project was funded by Virginia Tech’s Global Change Center, the Institute for Society, Culture, and the Environment, and the Fralin Life Sciences Institute. The contributing faculty members aim to expand their research by looking to see if similar correlations between environment health and human well-being extend across the Mid-Atlantic and the U.S. as a whole.

FOR MORE INFORMATION: Virginia Tech

To avoid a substantial increase in water scarcity, biomass plantations for energy production need sustainable water management, a new study shows. Bioenergy is frequently considered one of the options to reduce greenhouse gases for achieving the Paris climate goals, especially if combined with capturing the CO2 from biomass power plants and storing it underground. Yet growing large-scale bioenergy plantations worldwide does not just require land, but also considerable amounts of freshwater for irrigation – which can be at odds with respecting Earth’s Planetary Boundaries. Scientists now calculated in their to date most detailed computer simulations how much additional water stress could result for people worldwide in a scenario of conventional irrigation and one of sustainable freshwater use.

“Irrigation of future biomass plantations for energy production without sustainable water management, combined with population growth, could double both the global area and the number of people experiencing severe water stress by the end of the century, according to our computer simulations,” says lead author Fabian Stenzel from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) who developed the research idea in the Young Scientists Summer Program of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). “However, sustainable water management could almost halve the additional water stress compared to another analyzed scenario of strong climate change unmitigated by bioenergy production.”

Both political regulation and on-farm improvements needed

“Sustainable water management means both political regulation – such as pricing or water allocation schemes – to reduce the amounts of water taken from rivers as well as on-farm improvements to make more efficient use of the water,” says co-author Sylvia Tramberend from IIASA. This could include cisterns for rainwater collection or mulching to reduce evaporation. “Moreover, sustainable water management includes the preservation of reliable river flows to ensure undisturbed ecosystems in and alongside rivers. Up- and downstream river management may in fact require international cooperation calling for more transboundary river management as well as between different water users – that’s the challenge ahead for integrated water resource management.”

Largely unmitigated global warming together with population growth would increase the number of people under water stress by about 80% in the simulations. Enhanced use of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage could limit climate change: When plants grow, they take up CO2 from the air and build it into their trunks, twigs and leaves. If this biomass is burned in power plants and the CO2 is captured from the exhausts and stored underground (carbon capture and storage, in short CCS), this can eventually help reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere – scientists call this ‘negative emissions’.

In many scenarios, these are seen as necessary for meeting ambitious climate mitigation targets if direct emission reductions proceed too slowly, and to balance any remaining greenhouse gas emissions that are difficult or impossible to reduce, for instance potentially in aviation, certain types of industry or in livestock production.

Water scarcity remains a huge challenge

“According to existing scenarios, biomass plantations could increase by up to 6 million square kilometers if global warming is to be limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, the more ambitious of the two temperature targets of the Paris Agreement,” says co-author Dieter Gerten from PIK. “We use these scenario inputs to run simulations in our high-resolution global vegetation and water balance model to explore the freshwater implications. While substantial irrigation implied in a bioenergy plus CCS scenario including population growth suggests a 100% increase in the number of people facing water stress, combining it with sustainable water management brings the number down to 60%. This, of course, is still an increase, so challenging tradeoffs are on the table.”

Regions that already suffer from water stress today would be most affected in the climate change scenario, like the Mediterranean, the Middle East, northeastern China, South-East and southern West Africa. In the bioenergy plus CCS scenario without sustainable water management, high water stress extends to some otherwise unaffected regions, like the East of Brazil and large parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. Here, large biomass plantation areas in need of irrigation are assumed in the scenario analyzed.

Sustainable Development Goals and Planetary Boundaries must be taken into account

Climate mitigation is one of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) the world has agreed to achieve. The water–energy–environment nexus studied in this research highlights that pathways to sustainability must consider all affected SDGs.  

“The numbers show that either way, sustainable water management is a challenge urgently to be addressed,” says co-author Wolfgang Lucht, head of PIK’s Earth System Analysis research department. „This new study confirms that measures currently considered to stabilize our climate, in this case bioenergy plus CCS, must take into account a number of further dimensions of our Earth system – water cycles are one of them. Risks and tradeoffs have to be carefully considered before launching large-scale policies that establish biomass markets and infrastructure. The concept of Planetary Boundaries considers the whole Earth system, including but not limited to climate. Particularly the integrity of our biosphere must be acknowledged to protect a safe operating space for humanity.” 

FOR MORE INFORMATION: Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK)

Global atmospheric drying — known by scientists as a rise in vapor pressure deficit — has been observed worldwide since the early 2000s. In recent years, this concerning phenomenon has been on the rise, and is predicted to amplify even more in the coming decades as climate change intensifies. 

In a new paper published in the journal Global Change Biology, research from the University of Minnesota and Western University in Ontario, Canada, outlines global atmospheric drying significantly reduces productivity of both crops and non-crop plants, even under well-watered conditions. The new findings were established on a large-scale analysis covering 50 years of research and 112 plant species.

“When there is a high vapor pressure deficit, our atmosphere pulls water from other sources: animals, plants, etc.,” said senior author Walid Sadok, an assistant professor in the Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics at the University of Minnesota. “An increase in vapor pressure deficit places greater demand on the crop to use more water. In turn, this puts more pressure on farmers to ensure this demand for water is met — either via precipitation or irrigation — so that yields do not decrease.”

“We believe a climate change-driven increase in atmospheric drying will reduce plant productivity and crop yields — both in Minnesota and globally,” said Sadok.

In their analysis, researchers suspected plants would sense and respond to this phenomenon in unexpected ways, generating additional costs on productivity. Findings bear out that various plant species — from wheat, corn, and even birch trees — take cues from atmospheric drying and anticipate future drought events.

Through this process, plants reprogram themselves to become more conservative — or in other words: grow smaller, shorter and more resistant to drought, even if the drought itself does not happen. Additionally, due to this conservative behavior, plants are less able to fix atmospheric CO₂ to perform photosynthesis and produce seeds. The net result? Productivity decreases.

“As we race to increase production to feed a bigger population, this is a new hurdle that will need to be cleared,” said Sadok. “Atmospheric drying could limit yields, even in regions where irrigation or soil moisture is not limiting, such as Minnesota.”

On a positive note, the analysis indicates different species or varieties within species respond more or less strongly to this drying depending on their evolutionary and genetic make-up. For example, in wheat, some varieties are less responsive to this new stress compared to others, and this type of variability seems to exist within other non-crop species as well.

“This finding is particularly promising as it points to the possibility of breeding for genotypes with an ability to stay productive despite the increase in atmospheric drying,” said Sadok.

Danielle Way, a plant physiologist and co-author of the study from Western University, sees similar outcomes when it comes to ecosystems.

“Variation in plants’ sensitivity to atmospheric drying could also be leveraged to predict how natural ecosystems will respond to climate change and manage them in ways that increase their resilience to climate change,” she said.

In the future, researchers believe these findings can be used to design new crop varieties and manage ecosystems in ways that make them more resilient to atmospheric drying. However, new collaborations are needed between plant physiologists, ecologists, agronomists, breeders and farmers to make sure the right kind of variety is released to farmers depending on their specific conditions.

“Ultimately, this investigation calls for more focused interdisciplinary research efforts to better understand, predict and mitigate the complex effects of atmospheric drying on ecosystems and food security,” Sadok and Way said.

The research was funded by grants from the Minnesota Wheat Research & Promotion Council, the Minnesota Soybean Research and Promotion Council and the Minnesota Department of Agriculture.

FOR MORE INFORMATION: University of Minnesota

Humans have made a remarkable impact on the planet, from clearing forests for agriculture and urbanization to altering the chemistry of the atmosphere with fossil fuels. Now, a new study in the journal Nature reveals for the first time the extent of human impact on the global water cycle.

The study used NASA’s Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat-2) to assemble the largest ever dataset of seasonal water levels in more than 227,000 lakes, ponds and reservoirs worldwide. The data reveal that even though human-managed reservoirs comprise only a small percentage of all water bodies, they account for 57% of the total seasonal water storage changes globally.

“We tend to think of the water cycle as a purely natural system: Rain and snowmelt run into rivers, which run to the ocean where evaporation starts the whole cycle again,” said Sarah Cooley, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University who launched the research project while a graduate student at Brown University. “But humans are actually intervening substantially in that cycle. Our work demonstrates that humans are responsible for a majority of the seasonal surface water storage variability on Earth.”

Cooley led the work with Laurence Smith, a professor of environmental sciences at Brown, and Johnny Ryan, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society. 

The researchers say the study provides a critical baseline for tracking the global hydrological cycle as climate change and population growth put new stresses on freshwater resources.

An extraordinary dataset

Launched into orbit in 2018, ICESat-2’s primary mission is to track changes in the thickness and elevation of ice sheets around the world. It does so with a laser altimeter, which uses pulses of light to measure elevation to an accuracy of 25 millimeters. Cooley, who has experience using satellites to study water levels in Arctic lakes, was interested in bringing the satellite’s precise measurement capacity to bear on lake levels worldwide.

Cooley says that ICESat-2’s laser altimeter has far greater resolution than instruments used to measure water levels in the past. That made it possible to gather a large, precise dataset that included small ponds and reservoirs.

“With older satellites, you have to average results over a large area, which limits observations to only the world’s largest lakes,” Cooley said. “ICESat has a small footprint, so we can get levels for small lakes that we couldn’t get close to before. That was important for understanding global water dynamics, since most lakes and reservoirs are pretty small.”

From October 2018 to July 2020, the satellite measured water levels in 227,386 bodies of water, ranging in size from the American Great Lakes to ponds with areas less than one tenth of a square mile. Each water body was observed at different times of year to track changes in water levels. The researchers cross-referenced the water bodies they observed with a database of reservoirs worldwide to identify which water bodies were human-controlled and which were natural.

While countries like the U.S. and Canada gauge reservoir levels and make that information publicly available, many countries don’t publish such data. And very few non-reservoir lakes and ponds are gauged at all. So there was no way to do this analysis without the precise satellite observations, the researchers said.

  Commandeering the water cycle

The study found that while natural lakes and ponds varied seasonally by an average of .22 meters, human-managed reservoirs varied by .86 meters. Added together, the much larger variation in reservoirs compared to natural lakes means that reservoirs account for 57% of the total variation. In some places, however, human influence was even stronger than that. For example, in arid regions like the Middle East, American West, India and Southern Africa, variability attributed to human control surges to 90% and above.

“Of all the volume changes in freshwater bodies around the planet — all the floods, droughts and snowmelt that push lake levels up and down — humans have commandeered almost 60% of that variability,” Smith said. “That’s a tremendous influence on the water cycle. In terms of human impact on the planet, this is right up there with impacts on land cover and atmospheric chemistry.”

As the first global quantification of human impacts on the water cycle, the results will provide a crucial baseline for future research on how the impacts affect ecosystems around the world, the researchers say.

In a separate study published recently in Geophysical Research Letters, the research team was able to use ICESat-2 data to shed light on how reservoir water is being used. The study showed that in places like the Middle East, reservoir levels tend to be lower in summer and higher in the winter. That suggests that water is being released in the dry season for irrigation and drinking water. In contrast, the trend in places like Scandinavia was the opposite. There, water is released in the winter to make hydroelectric power for heating.

“This was an exploratory analysis to see if we can use remote sensing to understand how reservoirs are being used at a global scale,” Ryan said.

Smith says he expects satellites to play an increasing role in study of the Earth’s water cycle. For the past few years, he has been working with NASA on the Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission, which will be dedicated entirely to this kind of research.

“I think within the next three years we are going to see an explosion of high-quality satellite hydrology data, and we’re going to have a much better idea of what’s going on with water all over the planet,” Smith said. “That will have implications for security, trans-boundary water agreements, forecasting crop futures and more. We’re right on the edge of a new understanding of our planet’s hydrology.”

The research was supported by the NASA Studies with ICESat-2 Program (80NSSC20K0963) and the NASA Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission (80NSSC20K1144S).

FOR MORE INFORMATION: Brown University

Scientists have identified that the COVID-19 virus could be transmitted through faecal contaminated river water.

A team of researchers, including water quality, epidemiology, remote sensing and modelling experts, led by Dr Jamie Shutler at the University of Exeter, have developed a fast and simple way to assess the potential risk of water-borne transmission of the COVID-19 virus, posed by sewage spills into open and closed freshwater networks. 

The new study, published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology – Water, identifies the relative risk of viral transmission by sewerage spills, across 39 different counties. 

The study used information on the environment, a population’s infection rate, and water usage to calculate the potential potency of viral loads in the event of a sewerage spill. 

The research team believe the new study could provide fresh impetus in identifying new ways in which to prevent the spread of the virus amongst communities and the environment. 

Dr Jamie Shutler, lead author of the study and at the University of Exeter’s Penryn Campus in Cornwall said: “it’s important to identify and break all viable transmission routes if we want to stop any future outbreaks”. 

Airborne water droplets have previously been highlighted as the main route for transmission of the virus which causes COVID-19, but we know that other forms of transmission are likely to exist. 

Previous studies have shown that COVID-19 viral pathogens can be found in untreated wastewater, in concentrations consistent with population infection rates. While studies are still relatively early in relation to COVID-19, other human coronaviruses are documented to survive in wastewater, with colder water temperature likely to increase viral survival. 

Using this knowledge and existing methods, the research team identified how the transmission risk from water contaminated with sewage reduces over time. 

This issue is likely to be especially problematic in parts of the world with a large proportion of temporary settlements, such as shanty towns, favellas or refugee camps, which are less likely to have safe sanitisation systems. Or any densely populated region that has high infection rates that also suffers from a sewage spill. 

Modifying established pollution analysis methods, the team were able to estimate the viral concentration in rivers after a sewage spill. This meant they could calculate the relative transmission risk posed to humans by contaminated waterways for 39 countries.  

These methods, the team argue, provides a fast way to assess the transmission risk associated to sewage spills through the use of easily available population, infection rate and environmental data, allowing evidence based guidance following a spill. 

Dr Shutler added: “we hope that water companies or NGOs will use our simple spreadsheet calculator, that is freely available, to estimate the transmission risk after a spill. They can then use this information to advise the public.” 

 This research was partially funded by the European Union project Aquasense, which is focussing on novel methods to study and monitor water quality. 

The research resulted from a collaboration between the University of Exeter in Cornwall, the University of Glasgow, the Łukasiewicz-Institute of Electron Technology in Poland, and the University of Agriculture in Kraków, Poland. 

Journal Reference:

1. Jamie D. Shutler, Krzysztof Zaraska, Thomas Holding, Monika Machnik, Kiranmai Uppuluri, Ian G. C. Ashton, Łukasz Migdał, Ravinder S. Dahiya. Rapid Assessment of SARS-CoV-2 Transmission Risk for Fecally Contaminated River Water. ACS ES&T Water, 2021; DOI: 10.1021/acsestwater.0c00246

FOR MORE INFORMATION: https://www.exeter.ac.uk/news/research/title_845759_en.html

Europeans spend more than £700 billion (€800bn) a year on recreational visits to water bodies – but perceived poor water quality costs almost £90 billion (€100bn) in lost visits, a new study has found.

The new research – led by a European collaboration involving the University of Exeter and the University of Stirling – used data from 11,000 visits in 14 different countries to analyse the economic value of water bodies, such as rivers, lakes, waterfalls, beaches and seaside promenades.

The research team estimated that people spend an average of £35 (€40) travelling to and from these sites, with a typical family making 45 such trips each year.

The team also found that people were much less likely to visit sites if the perceived water quality fell, at a cost of well over €100 billion per year. The finding highlights the importance of maintaining and improving high bathing water quality standards.

Published in Science of the Total Environment, the team’s calculations indicate that, across Europe, total expenditure relating to trips to water-based settings is in excess of £700 billion annually.

Professor Tobias Börger, of the Berlin School of Economics and Law, used data collected as part of the European Union-funded BlueHealth project, which surveyed more than 18,000 people on their use of water bodies and their health and wellbeing. He explained: “The COVID-19 crisis has taught us all how important access to natural green and blue spaces is for people’s mental health and wellbeing. Our research highlights that it’s also critical for the economy to maintain high standards of water quality, as the pandemic crisis begins to ease.”

Following a Directive adopted by the European Commission, across the EU-member states, more than 15,000 coastal and almost 7,000 inland designated bathing water sites must now prominently display signs stating water quality over the past four years. Around 95 per cent of sites meet minimum quality standards and are considered safe for bathing, while 85 per cent are rated as having excellent water quality.

Professor Danny Campbell, from the University of Stirling, a co-author on the study, added: “While the study reveals that changes in water quality matter to people, we found that household income and educational attainment are not related to visiting water bodies. This shows that all parts of society can and do enjoy the benefits of such visits in terms of recreation, health and wellbeing.”

The findings fit well with a growing body of work looking at people’s experiences of inland and coastal waters and health across Europe. Co-author of the study, Dr Mathew White at the University of Exeter, said: “Blue spaces benefit people in a variety of ways. They encourage physical activity, they help de-stress and relax people, and they are important places for spending quality time with family and friends, all things which help people’s mental and physical health. This research finds that good water quality is key in encouraging people to take up these benefits.”

The team hopes their study will help planners and regulators justify the costs of building and maintaining the infrastructure needed to keep bathing water quality high.

Journal Reference:

1. Tobias Börger, Danny Campbell, Mathew P. White, Lewis R. Elliott, Lora E. Fleming, Joanne K. Garrett, Caroline Hattam, Stephen Hynes, Tuija Lankia, Tim Taylor. The value of blue-space recreation and perceived water quality across Europe: A contingent behaviour study. Science of The Total Environment, 2021; 145597 DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.145597

FOR MORE INFORMATION: https://www.exeter.ac.uk/news/research/title_844637_en.html

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. —Many climate models focus on scenarios decades into the future, making their outcomes seem unreliable and problematic for decision-making in the immediate future. In a proactive move, researchers are using short-term forecasts to stress the urgency of drought risk in the United States and inform policymakers’ actions now.

A new study led by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign civil and environmental engineering professor Ximing Cai examines how drought propagates through climate, hydrological, ecological and social systems throughout different U.S. regions. The results are published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

“The same amount of precipitation, or the lack of thereof, in one region could have very different impacts on the hydrologic cycle, streamflow and water storage in another region,” Cai said. “The impacts of droughts are closely related to climate and environmental characteristics, and both together can have very different impacts on human water usage and supply.”

For example, the team predicted that lack of rainfall in the Southeastern region poses a greater risk than it does in the Southwest. The Southwest has a relatively large water-storage capacity, unlike the Southeast, which has a limited storage capacity and faces increased demand. Their prediction proved accurate, according to their models.

Cai and co-author Tushar Apurv compiled previously collected meteorologic, soil and hydrologic data from 30 regions around the U.S. from the past few decades. Using this data, they calculated a ratio representing how severe the hydrologic droughts are relative to meteorological droughts in these regions. This ratio helped them determine where water availability and water supply deficits have been occurring over time.

The study reports that precipitation deficits have decreased in Northern parts of the U.S. and increased in the Southwestern and Southeastern regions due to climate change, the researchers said. As a result, the Southwest has experienced severe drought effects on ecosystems in the area in recent years, which is likely to continue into the next decade – with severe drought conditions already in place since August.

However, according to the study, the forecasted Southeastern drought could lead to a very different outcome than the Southwestern drought.

“If this trend of increasing drought severity persists, as also predicted by other studies, the Southeast could be at very high risk for extreme drought, which might not have been realized in the past,” Cai said. “This will expose their water-supply infrastructure to stress beyond its design limit.”

In other words, there is a risk that the Southeast may not be as well prepared to handle near-future drought as the Southwest, which appears to have the situation better controlled, Cai said.

The researchers plan to explore more detailed studies on some of the watersheds to help uncover solutions, but they are more eager to flag the attention of policymakers right now.

“We think this study provides the scientific support needed to punctuate the immediate threat posed by drought,” Cai said. “We see our results as an incentive for decision-makers to bring drought mitigation to the forefront of environmental and water-management policy.”

Journal Reference:

1. Tushar Apurv, Ximing Cai. Regional Drought Risk in the Contiguous United States. Geophysical Research Letters, 2021; 48 (5) DOI: 10.1029/2020GL092200

FOR MORE INFORMATION: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, News Bureau

Starting in February, the UNDP-SIWI Water Governance Facility, Global Water Partnership, Alliance for Global Water Adaptation, and Cap-Net will deliver a 3-part series on water and climate.

The webinars will explore the role water should have in the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) under the Paris Agreement.

18 February: Interactions between water and different sectors. The first webinar we will discuss the importance of ensuring that water interactions are considered in their NDCs, as countries adjust development paths as a result of Covid-19 impact on country finances, intersectoral linkages, observations on differences between first and enhanced NDCs. It will introduce a practical tool for identifying climate and water inter-linkages.

25 February: From Commitments to Implementation. In the second webinar the conversation aims to share experiences in preparing documents that include climate change related activities, as well as their lessons from addressing commitments found in the first round of NDC’s.

4 March: Climate Finance – Exploring Options for Funding Water & Climate. The third webinar aims to build on the learnings of the first webinar that introduced the three main global climate finance mechanisms and their modalities. In this session the emphasis will be on the practicalities of securing finance, obtaining accreditation, and building good investment cases by using examples from successful entities.

• Registration and useful resources for the webinars are available here.

FOR MORE INFORMATION: https://www.unwater.org/climate-and-water-webinar-series/