After more than 1,000 days of drought, the Catalan government has formally announced a state of emergency, extending water restrictions to Barcelona and the surrounding region.
Announcing the measures on Thursday, Pere Aragonès, the Catalan president, said that in some areas it had not rained at all for three years, describing the situation as the worst drought in modern history.
It is estimated that 500mm of rain needs to fall in Cataloniato make up the deficit. Water reserves have fallen below 16%, a level low enough to trigger the emergency declaration.
Measures already in place in the north of the region, including a 20% reduction in agricultural irrigation and a ban on watering public parks, will be extended to Barcelona.
Public and private swimming pools will close, with exemptions for those in sports centres, although some pools are adapting to use sea water. Parks will no longer be watered but groundwater will be used to save the city’s 35,000 trees from dying.
There will be no showers on the beach nor ornamental fountains. Water parks and ice rinks will close and car washing is to be limited to commercial use. The restrictions will remain in force for at least the next 15 months.
Plans to reduce water pressure have been shelved, partly because Barcelonans are keeping within a daily consumption limit of 200 litres and also because nearly everyone lives in blocks of flats and a pressure drop would discriminate against those living on upper floors.
The situation in Barcelona would be far worse were it not home to Europe’s largest desalination plant, built after the last serious drought in 2008, which supplies the city with 33% of its drinking water. A further 25% comes from recycled wastewater.
However, it costs three times as much to produce a litre of desalinated water through reverse osmosis as it does to take water from rivers and reservoirs.
It also consumes a lot of energy, not all of which as yet comes from renewable sources and therefore exacerbates the root problem by adding to global emissions.
As the Barcelona restrictions extend into summer, they are likely to fuel simmering resentment towards tourists, who are perceived as overwhelming public services, such as some bus routes, to the exclusion of local people.
Tourists consume much more water than residents. Research carried out by the hoteliers’ association showed that in 2016 a guest in a five-star hotel used 545 litres of water a day, compared with residents’ consumption of 163 litres. The association claims tourist consumption has since been reduced to 242 litres.
The drought is not confined to the north-east of Spain. In Andalucía, in southern Spain, two successive hot, dry summers have devastated the olive harvest, reducing production by 50% and doubling the price of olive oil. The grape harvest has also been poor in much of the country as even vines struggle to survive.
Tourist industry bosses say that while it’s easy to point the finger at golf courses and swimming pools, 80% of Spain’s water is consumed by agriculture.
Long before the climate crisis entered the equation, Spain was living beyond its means in terms of water, damming and diverting its few major rivers to irrigate the market gardens in the southern desert regions of Almería and Murcia.
While agriculture accounts for only about 2.3% of GDP and employs only 4% of the workforce, it punches above its weight in politics, as became clear when the government tried to restrict water use on the vast strawberry farms in the south-west.
Spain has always had periods of drought but climatologists largely agree that the droughts are getting longer while rainfall diminishes and temperatures continue to rise.
Beauty companies will have to pay more to clean up micropollutants after EU negotiators struck a new deal to treat sewage.
Under draft rules that follow the “polluter pays principle”, companies that sell medicines and cosmetics will have to cover at least 80% of the extra costs needed to get rid of tiny pollutants that are dirtying urban wastewater. Governments will pay the rest, members of the bloc said, in an effort to prevent vital products from becoming too expensive or scarce.
Virginijus Sinkevičius, the bloc’s environment commissioner, said the steps would safeguard citizens from harmful discharges of pharmaceuticals and cosmetics that end up in water bodies. “This will make our water cleaner and protect our health.”
The rules, which have been agreed by the European parliament and council of the EU but not yet formally adopted, bulk up requirements to remove nutrients from water and set new standards for micropollutants. They also broaden the areas covered by the law.
By 2035 EU member states will have to remove organic matter from urban wastewater before releasing it into the environment in all communities with more than 1,000 people. By 2045 they will have to remove nitrogen and phosphorus in all treatment plants covering more than 10,000 people, if there is a risk to the environment or health. They will also have to add an extra step to remove a “broad spectrum” of micropollutants, according to the European parliament.
Governments will also have to monitor sewage for microplastics, “forever chemical” per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and key health indicators like antimicrobial resistance.
But member states have been slow to enforce existing rules to treat sewage. Last month, the European Commission referred Spain to the European court of justice for failing to comply with existing wastewater rules in 225 communities.
Nils Torvalds, a Finnish MEP with the liberal Renew grouping who was in charge of the proposal, said: “The deal we reached today is a breakthrough for significantly improved water management and wastewater treatment standards in Europe, especially with new rules on removing micropollutants coming from medicines and personal care products. We have ensured that the impact of this legislation on the affordability of medicines will not be disproportionate.”
The agreement is set to increase the divide between environmental protection in the EU and UK since Brexit. Earlier this month, the Guardian revealed that the UK is falling behind the EU on almost every area of environmental regulation and that its water industry has delayed plans to tackle the country’s sewage pollution crisis.
This article was amended on 1 February 2024. The headline and first line were changed to refer to micropollutants rather than to “microplastic pollution”. It is the council of the EU that has been involved in agreeing the rules, not the council of Europe. And EU member states will have to remove nitrogen and phosphorus in all treatment plants covering more than 10,000 people by 2045, only if there is a risk to the environment or health; this has been clarified.
Seventeen landfills across England are known to be producing a highly toxic liquid substance containing some banned and potentially carcinogenic “forever chemicals”, in some cases at levels 260 times higher than that deemed safe for drinking water, it can be revealed.
However the government says it does not know where these landfills are.
Over a 10-month period from 2021 to 2022, consultants working for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and the Environment Agency were asked to take samples from a “number of different operational and closed landfills” developed between the 1960s and the present day in order to provide an “overall picture” of the chemical substances found in the landfills’ leachate.
The results of the sampling, published in an Ends Report investigation and shared with the Guardian, reveal that in one landfill, the total sum of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in the raw leachate sample was 105,910 nanograms a litre (ng/l).
PFAS are a group of about 10,000 human-made chemicals used in industrial processes, firefighting foams and consumer products. They are known as “forever chemicals” owing to their persistence in the environment.
In England there are no restrictions on the total sum of PFAS allowed in drinking water, but the Drinking Water Inspectorate’s guidelines allow levels of PFOS and PFOA – two of the most widely used and studied types of PFAS – in drinking water at up to 100 ng/l. In the US, the legal limit is 0.004ng/l for PFOA and 0.02 ng/l for PFOS.
In one sample PFOA was recorded at 26,900 ng/l – 260 times higher than the current guidance for safe levels in drinking water in England.
PFOA is considered to be toxic above certain levels and has been linked to a range of diseases in humans including kidney cancer, testicular cancer, hypertension, thyroid disease, ulcerative colitis, high cholesterol and reduced response to vaccines.
According to the Environment Agency’s own definition, landfill leachate is a “potentially polluting liquid” which “unless managed and eventually returned to the environment in a carefully and controlled manner, may cause harmful effects on the groundwater and surface water that surround a landfill site”.
Although the quantities of PFAS found in each sample varied – with the lowest total recorded being 79 ng/l – the average across all the samples was 19,497 ng/l.
The data provided to Ends revealing the high levels of PFAS in the landfill leachate did not include location information, meaning it is not possible to assess their potential to contaminate drinking water sources.
When queried, the Environment Agency and Defra said they did not know the locations of these landfills because the contractors provided the government with an anonymised dataset.
This, they said, was because the purpose of the study was to “build an initial nationwide (England) picture of substances in landfill leachate that are known to be or suspected to be harmful to the environment”. They said the “study was not intended to carry out monitoring for the purpose of compliance regulations”.
An Environment Agency spokesperson said none of the landfills assessed “found this leachate being discharged directly into the environment”. They added that the agency was “working closely with the landfill industry to deepen our understanding of chemicals and any challenges they pose”.
“This is a hugely important study that is now informing our longer-term approach to managing risks to the environment. Defra will be publishing a report in due course.
“The Environment Agency wants to provide government with really compelling advice, fully evidenced, on the scale of the PFAS challenge and how it may be dealt with. This study is a very useful first step but more work is essential.
“The research is not intended as regulatory monitoring – as such the names and site locations were not required for this particular work, which was carried out by a contractor on our behalf.”
However, the admission that the locations of the landfills are not known to Defra and the Environment Agency has shocked experts. Dr Shubhi Sharma, scientific research assistant at campaign group Chem Trust, said it was “extremely worrying” that the Environment Agency “claims not to know the locations of landfills where high levels of PFAS have been found in leachate”.
“How can action be taken by the Environment Agency and others to deal with the contamination of local groundwater and soil if they don’t know the source of it? Workers, local residents and businesses have a right to know if their workplace or local area is polluted with toxic chemicals,” she added.
Penelope Gane, the head of practice at campaign group Fish Legal, said: “You would have thought that someone in the Environment Agency would be sitting up and taking notice with PFAS readings coming back hundreds of times higher than safe limits for drinking. What exactly is stopping the agency going back to its contractors and asking for the location of these sites?”
While it is impossible to say where the 17 problem landfills are located, there are multiple pollution pathways associated with landfill leachate which are well known to environmental experts.
The Environment Agency has said that most of the sites targeted by the survey were operational landfills, receiving household and commercial waste which have containment systems to prevent leachate escaping into the ground or groundwater.
However, the Environment Agency says in its guidance that “even the best-engineered landfill sites will leak to some extent” and states that “while it is possible that the best of engineered landfill sites will contain and control leachate with minimal leakage, there is always a probability that some failure in engineering will occur”.
Landfills that are no longer operational have long been a concern owing to their potential for contamination. These landfills typically have no leachate or gas containment and limited or no records of the source, type, or volume of waste stored.
According to Kate Spencer, professor of environmental geochemistry at Queen Mary University and expert in historic coastal landfills, “if the landfills aren’t lined then they are almost certainly leaching those chemicals directly into the environment”.
Spencer said that when assessing the risk posed by these landfills it was important to think about the likelihood of people coming into contact with these concentrations. But to do that, you would need to know what the pathways are.
“If you were to tell me that one of these sites was a historic unlined site, and it was in close proximity to groundwater or to a river, and if you were to tell me that that groundwater or that river was also a drinking water source, then that’s concerning,” she said.
Water companies have been urged to invest their profits in cutting bills to “rebuild” trust in the tarnished industry, as suppliers in England and Wales announced costs would jump from April.
But the industry said bills would have been £60 higher if they had kept pace with inflation over the past decade. However, the group’s argument will do little to reduce public outrage during a cost of living crisis for an industry that has been condemned for sewage dumping, years of underinvestment in infrastructure, large dividends, big bonuses and high debt levels.
Water UK said the average combined bill for water and sewage services would be £473 – or £1.29 a day – from April. However, each supplier has set its own rates, based on factors including allowances and restrictions by the regulator Ofwat, bill increases in previous years and inflation.
Wessex Water customers face the most expensive bills, with their annual cost rising to £548 next financial year, from £489. Anglian customers will pay £529, up from £489.
The Observer revealed last month that the north Wales water company Hafren Dyfrdwy was expected to make the biggest increase, while Welsh Water was likely to reduce bills as a result of penalties for supply interruptions and leakage during the last financial year.
Annual bills for Hafren Dyfrdwy customers will jump nearly 20% to £433. Welsh Water will cut bills by £20 to £492 and South West Water will shave £2 off annual bills by next year.
Last year the industry vowed to invest £10bn to tackle sewage pollution, but “urgent” plans to detail the investments for MPs have been delayed.
On Friday, Water UK said companies would invest £14.4bn – the highest amount in a single year – to help “ensure the security of our water supply in the future and significantly reduce the amount of sewage in rivers and seas”.
The Water UK chief executive, David Henderson, said: “Next year will see record levels of investment from water companies to secure the security of our water supply in the future and significantly reduce the amount of sewage in rivers and seas.”
These investments include the completion of the Thames “super sewer”; work on the Havant Thicket reservoir project in Hampshire; and a £39m water treatment works to be built by South East Water in Kent, where residents have endured supply interruptions and water shortages.
Henderson said support for customer bills was doubling, with more than 2 million families to be helped.
But the Consumer Council for Water (CCW) repeated calls for the remaining water suppliers to join Welsh Water, Severn Trent, Yorkshire Water, SES Water and United Utilities in using their profits to help fund social tariffs, rather than part-funding this through charges on other customers.
Mike Keil, the chief executive of the CCW, said: “Almost a fifth of households say they struggle to pay their water bill, and these rises will heap even greater pressure on low-income customers. If water companies are serious about rebuilding trust in the sector, they should use some of their profits to help people who cannot afford another bill rise.”
The Liberal Democrat environment spokesperson, Tim Farron MP, said: “This is a kick in the teeth from the same dodgy water firms who pollute rivers with sewage while pocketing millions in bonuses. They have no shame. This price hike is a disgrace and should be scrapped immediately.”
The credit rating agency Moody’s has warned that water companies face an “elevated” risk from cyber attackers targeting drinking water, as suppliers wait on permission from the industry regulator to ramp up spending on digital security.
Moody’s said, in a report to investors, that hackers are increasingly zeroing in on infrastructure companies, including water and wastewater treatment companies, and the use of AI (artificial intelligence) could accelerate this trend.
Last month, Southern Water, which supplies 4.6 million customers in the south of England, said the Black Basta ransomware group had claimed to have accessed its systems, posting a “limited amount” of data on the dark web. The same group hacked outsourcing firm Capita last year.
Separately, South Staffordshire Water apologised in 2022 after hackers stole customers’ personal data.
Moody’s warned that the growing use of data-logging equipment to monitor water consumption, and the use of digital smart meters, made companies more vulnerable to attacks. It said systems used in water treatment facilities were typically separated from the rest of the companies’ IT – including customer databases – but some systems had been more closely integrated to improve efficiency.
After a hack, companies typically have to employ specialist cybersecurity firms to repair systems, spend on communicating with customers, and face potential penalties from regulators. The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office can fine firms up to 4% of group turnover, or €20m (£17m), whichever is higher.
Moody’s said that the cost of fixing systems, including resecuring and strengthening existing cyber defences and paying potential fines, will typically result in only a “modest increase” in debt levels if the incident is short-lived.
However, Moody’s cautioned: “The greater risk for the sector, and society, is if malicious actors are able to access operational technology systems to impair drinking water or wastewater treatment facilities.”
The agency said that water suppliers, the government and regulators had acknowledged the need to bolster cyber defences “given the growing sophistication of attacks on critical infrastructure, with state-aligned actors a recent but growing class of cyber adversary”.
The Moody’s report comes as water companies in England and Wales hope to increase their spending on cyber defences by gaining allowances from Ofwat. The regulator is assessing their plans to raise bills from 2025 to 2030 to cover investments.
Last October, companies submitted five-year business plans detailing their planned bill increases, needed to fund a record £96bn investment to fix raw sewage leaks, reduce leaks and build reservoirs.
Moody’s analysis showed companies hope to increase spending on security from less than £100m collectively to nearly £700m over the next five years. The increased scrutiny of the sector, and the hack at Southern Water, may strengthen its case, the credit agency said.
The agency said that South Staffordshire Water costs related to the hack, including potential civil claims, could reach £10m.
In 1997 Union County in southern Arkansas faced a serious crisis: its key water source, the Sparta Aquifer, was declining by as much as two meters per year. This underground reservoir of water trapped within pores and fractures in rock was the county’s only supply, and it was disappearing.
“If we didn’t do something in five years or less, we were going to lose our water source,” says Sherrel Johnson, projects manager for the Union County Water Conservation Board, which formed in response to the crisis.
Just two years later the county’s water board instituted a new groundwater pumping fee, and citizens voted for a temporary tax to pay for $65 million worth of new infrastructure—to draw and treat water from the nearby Ouachita River instead. Today the part of the aquifer that once showed steep declines is now 36 meters higher than it was in 2004.
A study published on Wednesday in Nature suggests other places may need to look to Union County’s example. The new research shows that crucial aquifers around the world are drying up. And in 30 percent of such cases, the current drop-offs are happening faster than ever before. “Groundwater is declining rapidly, especially in dry places where cultivation is widespread,” says study leader Scott Jasechko, an assistant professor of water resources at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
In the Great Plains, the Ogallala Aquifer (a massive underground reservoir stretching from Texas to South Dakota) is becoming depleted in many places as farmers draw on the region’s groundwater to irrigate their crops, especially in times of drought. In 2022 alone, for example, average groundwater levels across western and south-central Kansas dropped by 0.6 meter, according to the Kansas Geological Survey.
Many aquifers are monitored at wellheads, but scientists have long supplemented these data with more approximate satellite measurements to get a rough global picture of depletion. Until now, no one had combined detailed, on-the-ground monitoring with a worldwide scope, the authors say. Jasechko and his collaborators did just that by gathering wellhead monitoring data from 170,000 wells in 1,693 aquifer systems in more than 40 countries.
These data show that 36 percent of aquifers are losing water at more than 0.1 meter per year and that 12 percent are declining at more than 0.5 meter per year. Among aquifers for which there were enough data to compare current trends with the years 1980 to 2000, 30 percent show accelerating losses. The aquifers that are losing water tend to be in regions that are also experiencing declining precipitation over time. “During droughts, in drylands, humans tend to rely on groundwater more,” Jasechko says.
The news from the new study wasn’t all bad, however. In 20 percent of the aquifers that had been monitored long-term, declines are slowing rather than accelerating. In 16 percent, a declining trend has reversed. And in 13 percent, the aquifer has actually grown over time. “We are seeing a very complex picture,” says study co-author Mohammad Shamsudduha, a risk and disaster reduction researcher at University College London.
The findings show that groundwater depletion isn’t inevitable, Jasechko says. In the places where groundwater loss is slowing or where aquifers are refilling, these trends are usually caused by human decisions. In Bangkok, for example, new fees on private well pumping were instituted in the early 2000s; this reversed groundwater losses and slowed the massive city’s land subsidence problems. Outside of Tucson, Ariz., a project that began in 2008 now uses water from the Colorado River to refill the once struggling Avra Valley Aquifer.
Such changes can be controversial, says Johnson, who spearheaded the effort in Union County. “Paying for water was the toughest challenge,” she says, referring to the fact that industries that originally pumped water from the aquifer for free had to start paying a fee. But the infrastructure, built largely with county tax dollars and the water-pumping fee, now supplies the county’s main industries with river water, Johnson says, and that infrastructure has proven a boon for luring new development.
“You have to have trusted leadership,” she says, “and good science and tenacity.”
Israel’s military has begun injecting “high-flow” seawater into Hamas-built tunnels beneath the Gaza Strip as part of its attempt to “neutralize terrorist infrastructures.”
On 30 January, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) confirmed that the plan to flood tunnels under the Gaza Strip, a strategy that has been the subject of rumours since December, is being implemented at a number of undisclosed locations. The IDF’s statement added that the move was a “significant engineering and technological breakthrough” and that locations were chosen so that “groundwater in the area would not be compromised.”
However, some water researchers are warning that flooding tunnels with seawater could have a devastating effect on Gaza’s already scarce freshwater supplies and might destabilize buildings. There are also concerns that flooding the tunnels could endanger many of the approximately 130 remaining Israeli hostages who were abducted by Hamas in its attacks of 7 October 2023. The hostages’ locations remain unknown. But one researcher& Nature spoke to says he suspects the impact of the flooding will be limited, because Gaza’s aquifer is already contaminated by seawater.
The tunnels are a “spider web” of damp passageways dug in sandy soil, former hostage Yocheved Lifshitz told the media after she was released last October. One tunnel is 50 metres deep, according to Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and some have several entrance shafts and are reinforced with concrete and equipped with power cables and piping. The tunnels are probably used to store weapons, as well as for holding hostages captive. They extend to almost every corner of the crowded and devastated 363-square-kilometre Gaza Strip.
BIGGEST CONCERN
One of the biggest concerns is that seawater used to flood the tunnels will contaminate an important coastal aquifer, which lies between Gaza, Egypt and Israel and supplies nearly 80% of Gaza’s water.
Mark Zeitoun, a water engineer and director-general of the Geneva Water Hub in Switzerland, says that Gaza’s main source of drinking water is being contaminated. “If you put salty water into a freshwater source, it’s polluting, it’s contaminating, it’s poisoning,” he says.
There’s a possibility that the seawater, once pumped into the tunnels, will simply leak out, Zeitoun adds. “If you just try filling the tunnels with water, I assume that they’re not sealed well enough to hold any water. The water would drain out and into the aquifer,” he says.
Geographer Ahmed Ra’fat Ghodieh, based at An-Najah National University in Nablus in the West Bank, agrees that the aquifer is likely to become irreparably contaminated with salt water.
“If they flood these tunnels, then the seawater will penetrate the geological strata, towards the aquifer,” says Ghodieh. “Such action will have severe consequences on all aspects of life in Gaza — on agriculture, on soil, on infrastructure.” Ghodieh adds that the seawater could create sinkholes that destabilize the foundations of buildings.
But hydrologist Noam Weisbrod, who is dean of the Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, says that those concerned that the entire coastal aquifer will be irreparably contaminated are probably overestimating the flooding’s effects. “I’m not sure that the environmental risk is as extreme as people want to believe,” he says. The impact of flooding would differ depending on where the affected tunnels are located, he adds.
The water level of Gaza’s coastal aquifer ranges from about 60 metres below the surface in the east to just a few metres deep near the coastline, according to a 2020 study published in the journal Water. More water is being drawn out of the aquifer than can be replaced naturally by fresh water, and as a result the aquifer is already being infiltrated by seawater.
Weisbrod’s reasoning takes into account the fact that, in areas close to the coast, the water in the aquifer is already saline. Moreover, he says, “large sections of the aquifer water are already contaminated from unregulated sewage systems, fertilizers and more”.
Weisbrod also says that Israel’s plan could have limited impact. The tunnel network “is not one big metro plan like in New York or in London,” he explains. “It’s not one big thing that is all connected. So, you’ll use a lot of effort and you’ll flood something quite limited, eventually. So maybe it’s not worth it.”
GAZA’S WATER CRISIS
The debate over the tunnels highlights a problem that existed before the flooding started: clean water is scarce in Gaza, irrespective of the extent to which the aquifer is contaminated by seawater pumping. In 2020, United Nations agencies estimated that 10% of the population had access to safe drinking water.
Some water is piped in by Israel and Egypt. A €10-million (US$10.9-million) seawater desalination plant funded by the European Union opened in Gaza in 2017, but it presumably cannot function without an electricity supply. Before the war, around half of Gaza’s electricity came from Israel, but, in October, the Israeli government cut off supplies.
Almost 1.9 million people have been displaced by the war, with many living in tents or on the streets in the southern Gazan city of Rafah. Following torrential rains in January, many are collecting drinking water in dishes and buckets, Ghodieh says. Others buy water from tanker trucks — low-quality water from the aquifer that has been desalinated by private companies — says David Lehrer, director of the Center for Applied Environmental Diplomacy at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies in the Arava Valley, Israel.
When the war ends, Israel and Gaza need to start planning for a better water future, Lehrer says. In 2023, through a partnership with the Israeli company Watergen, the Palestinian non-governmental organization Damur for Community Development, and the Israeli Civil Administration, the Arava Institute installed five solar-powered atmospheric water generators at municipal health-care centres in Gaza. According to the Arava Institute, these can generate around 900 litres of clean drinking water per day by capturing humidity, condensing and filtering it.
This initiative, and other interim measures such as off-grid wastewater treatment, Lehrer says, will “provide a glimmer of hope that the situation will eventually improve.”
And yet, until the late 19th century, the San Joaquin Valley held a lake more than 100 miles long and over 30 miles wide.
Tulare Lake “was the largest body of fresh water west of the Mississippi River. It’s really difficult to imagine that now,” says Vivian Underhill, formerly a postdoctoral research fellow at Northeastern University with the Social Science and Environmental Health Research Institute.
Once, Underhill says, there was so much water that a steamship could carry “agricultural supplies from the Bakersfield area up to Fresno and then up to San Francisco”—a distance of nearly 300 miles.
The “ancestral lakes” and connecting waterways that made such a route possible have all but disappeared thanks to manmade irrigation, Underhill says.
Called “Pa’ashi” by the indigenous Tachi Yokut tribe, Tulare Lake was fed primarily by snowmelt out of the Sierra Nevada mountains, Underhill says, as opposed to rainfall. And because “there’s no natural outlet within the valley,” the water collects to form a lake.
To many traveling through the San Joaquin Valley today, it’s hard to imagine such a large body of water co-existing alongside such an arid landscape, Underhill says. But in the 1800s, “Fresno was a lakeside town.”
One unnamed prospector, she continues, reported that “there was driftwood piled in the trees of downtown Fresno” because of recent flooding.
Where did the water go?
The lake first began disappearing in the late 1850s and early 1860s, Underhill says, propelled by “the state of California’s desire to take public land and put it into private ownership.”
However, Underhill continues, “when we say ‘public land,’ that is historically indigenous land that the state of California blanket-proclaimed as ‘public.'”
“They really wanted to get [land] into private hands so that indigenous land claims—that were ongoing at that time—would be rendered moot by the time they went through the courts.”
This process was called “reclamation” and often entailed “either draining inundated land or irrigating desert land to create arable farmland. Reclamation really was a process across the entire U.S. west,” Underhill says.
If “people could drain that land,” she says, they would “be granted ownership of parts of that land. So there was a big incentive for white settlers to start doing that work.”
“It was a deeply settler colonial project” that “proceeded in fits and starts.”
The first time the lake fully disappeared was around 1890, when its “water essentially was [used to] irrigate all of the arid lands around that area.”
“Now the valley is crisscrossed by hundreds of irrigation canals, all of which were originally built to take that lake water and put it onto irrigated fields,” she says.
But in 2023, Tulare Lake—Pa’ashi—came back. “California just got inundated with snow in the winter and then rain in the spring,” Underhill says. “If you have a rain and snow event, the snow melts really fast.”
And all that snow and rain in the Sierra still runs into the depression where Tulare Lake once sat.
A complicated homecoming
Underhill’s quick to note that this isn’t the lake’s only return since the 1800s, however. “It happened in the ’80s, it happened once in the ’60s, a couple of times in the ’30s.”
The repercussions for the lake’s return are complex and layered, Underhill says, with sometimes oppositional effects between wildlife and the humans who live in the valley.
Before the lake’s disappearance into irrigation canals and watering spigots, “People talk about there being so many wetland birds,” Underhill says, “that if you startled them, when they lifted off it was like a giant clap that resounded across the landscape.”
Now, after less than a year back, “birds of all kinds—pelicans, hawks, waterbirds” are returning. And Underhill notes that “the Tachi also say that they’ve seen burrowing owls nesting around the shore,” a species described as “vulnerable or imperiled” by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Tulare Lake was once part of the Pacific Flyway, Underhill says—it was an important stopover area for migratory birds. “The loss of that habitat has been a major issue in bird conservation and bird diversity.”
“Something that continues to amaze me is—[the birds] know how to find the lake again. It’s like they’re always looking for it.”
In addition to species returning—including fish and amphibians likely brought down from the Sierras by rainfall and flooding—winds off the lake can cool temperatures by as much as 10 or 20 degrees, Underhill says. A real benefit when San Joaquin Valley summers often spike well above 100°F.
Differential effects
When it comes to human occupancy in the Central Valley, Underhill says that there are three distinct groups that have been affected by the lake’s return.
The first is the Tachi Yokuts, for whom “the return of the lake has been just an incredibly powerful and spiritual experience. They’ve been holding ceremonies on the side of the lake,” Underhill says. “They’ve been able to practice their traditional hunting and fishing practices again.”
The other two groups that Underhill says have been most affected are those involved in agricultural production: the farmworkers on the one hand and the growers on the other—those who own the land and employ the workers.
The growers, “over the last five decades or so, have built a complicated system of flood prevention,” Underhill says. In the latest flooding, these measures “protected some of their farmland, which was essentially the lowest elevation part of the historic lake.”
But by cordoning off this low-lying farmland with canals and weirs, it was the surrounding communities of workers that have now been flooded by Tulare Lake.
Many of these farmworkers “don’t speak English or are procedurally very distant from the state,” Underhill says. Unfortunately, they are also the ones who “experience the most personal, place-based impact in terms of having their housing flooded [or] losing their homes entirely.”
Looking out for the lake
“Most of the news coverage about this time talked about it as catastrophic flooding,” Underhill says. “And I don’t want to disregard the personal and property losses that people experienced, but what was not talked about so much is that it wasn’t only an experience of loss, it was also an experience of resurgence.”
She points to the return of native wildlife as one example, and to the Tachi’s ability to practice their traditions on the water.
Efforts are already underway to drain the lake once more, and Underhill expects it to remain in some form for about two more years—although new atmospheric river events over California this year could complicate that prediction.
“Under climate change,” Underhill says, “floods of this magnitude or higher will happen with increasing frequency.”
“At a certain point, I think it would behoove the state of California to realize that Tulare Lake wants to remain. And in fact, there’s a lot of economic benefit that could be gained from letting it remain.”
Of what happens next, Underhill says that “this landscape has always been one of lakes and wetlands, and our current irrigated agriculture is just a century-long blip in this larger geologic history.”
“This was not actually a flood. This is a lake returning.”
A recent study found bottled water contains far more pieces of plastic — tiny bits known as microplastics and even more minuscule nanoplastics — than previously estimated. The findings raise questions about potential health concerns, but experts say there some ways to reduce your exposure.
Just how much plastic are we talking about? The average liter of bottled water contains around 240,000 detectable plastic fragments, researchers found in the study, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
What are nanoplastics and microplastics?
Micro- and nanoplastics are both tiny fragments of plastic which just differ in size. Microplastics are small plastic pieces less than 5 millimeters long. These have been measured in large quantities in previous studies.
In the latest study, researchers also examined nanoplastics, which are particles less than 1 micrometer — a size “previously invisible under conventional imaging,” they wrote. For reference, the diameter of a human hair is about 70 micrometers.
They were able to find nanoplastics by probing water samples with lasers that were tuned to make specific molecules resonate.
They found that nanoplastics made up 90% of the plastic particles detected in the water samples, while microplastics accounted for the other 10%.
In response to the study, the International Bottled Water Association noted that there “currently is both a lack of standardized (measuring) methods and no scientific consensus on the potential health impacts of nano- and microplastic particles. Therefore, media reports about these particles in drinking water do nothing more than unnecessarily scare consumers.”
Can you avoid plastics in water?
It’s very hard to avoid this kind of nanoplastic exposure, says Dr. Céline Gounder, a CBS News medical contributor and editor-at-large for public health at KFF Health News. This is because plastic can be found in any beverages we consume from plastic bottles, and it’s in our food supply and in the environment as well.
One basic step you can take? Avoid plastic packaging when possible. “That will help reduce some of the risks,” Gounder said on “CBS Mornings.”
“Don’t microwave your food in plastics,” she advised. For food storage, “Try to use containers like glass or stainless steel. At least that’ll help reduce your exposure a little bit.”
Since some water filters can actually introduce other plastics, Gounder says, she suggests most people go straight to their tap for drinking water.
“Tap is generally going to be safe unless you have an area where there’s lead pipes or something like that,” she said.
Previous research has also found microplastics present in tap water, though far less than in bottled water.
Are plastic water bottles bad for you?
Researchers are unsure just how risky microscopic pieces of plastics are for people — it is a subject of ongoing research.
The International Bottled Water Association notes that there is “no scientific consensus on potential health impacts.”
The World Health Organization said in 2019 that potential hazards associated with microplastics come in three forms: from the particles themselves, the chemicals that make them up, and “microorganisms that may attach and colonize on microplastics, known as biofilms.”
“We don’t know if the plastic itself can cause health effects, but they are bonded to, or combined with, other chemicals like phthalates, for example, which are what make plastic more flexible,” Gounder explains. “So when you get these tiny pieces of plastic, you’re also getting exposed to these other chemicals.”
These chemicals, known as “endocrine disruptors,” can mimic things like estrogen and have hormonal effects.
“Those hormones or higher exposures to those kinds of hormones can be associated with anything from diabetes, to neurocognitive effects in little kids to cancer. So that is why we have some real concerns about these exposures,” Gounder said.
The study’s researchers also note that “nanoplastics are believed to be more toxic since their smaller size renders them much more amenable, compared to microplastics, to enter the human body.”
Beizhan Yan, an environmental chemist at Columbia University, also believes there is cause for concern.
“When they are getting into the nano size, they can potentially get into the blood and then they can be transported to the vital organs,” he told CBS News.
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) -Frustrated Mexico City residents have been protesting weeks of water shortages, with officials warning of “unprecedented” low levels in a main system that supplies millions of people.
The bustling metro area of 21 million people – one of Latin America’s largest cities – is struggling after years of low rainfall blamed on climate change, as well as chaotic urban growth and outdated infrastructure.
In the community of Acambay, about 80 miles (130 km) outside the Mexican capital, protesters forced open the gates of an office of Mexico’s National Water Commission (Conagua), breaking windows and ripping shingles off the roof, local media reported.
In the Azcapotzalco neighborhood of Mexico City, residents lined up to fill buckets and trashcans with water piped from a truck.
Azcapotzalco resident Maribel Gutierrez said she had been without water at her home for more than a month. Neighbors have started fighting over the limited supplies, residents said.
“I think they should be empathetic,” Gutierrez said of government officials. “We understand there was a serious water problem, but they must understand that water is vital for everyone.”
The Mexican capital, situated in a high-altitude valley and built on a former lake-bed, has struggled to supply its residents for years. It relies mostly on water pumped from its underground aquifer and reservoirs outside the city to meet demand.
Officials from Mexico City’s water utility SACMEX have said the Cutzamala System, a network of pumping plants, dams and other infrastructure that is the source of water for about 6 million people, is the most stressed it has ever been. They have asked residents to change habits in order to conserve as much water as possible.
“Due to … the number of residents, plus the population that comes to work in our city, it is in an unprecedented condition. It is something that we had not experienced during this administration, nor in previous administrations,” said Rafael Carmona, director of SACMEX.
The Cutzamala System was at 39.7% capacity on Jan. 29, down from about 41% in December and 54% this time last year, government data show.
Mexico City gets at least half its annual rainfall from the North American Monsoon between May and August. With recent seasons drier than usual, the city’s reservoirs are now depleted with no chance at rebounding until the summer months, said Andreas Prein, an atmospheric scientist for the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.
“In Mexico, you have to wait until May or June until you can really get a significant boost of precipitation to have a chance to recover water in the reservoirs,” Prein said.
The situation puts Mexico City and other major world capitals at risk for the so-called “whiplash effect,” Prein said – when a city experiences a rapid swing to wet conditions that can spark flooding.
“The swings are getting more extreme due to climate change,” Prein said. “This is what we see on a global scale.”
