Welsh Water has admitted to spilling untreated sewage near a rare dolphin habitat for at least a decade.
A BBC investigation found the water company had been illegally discharging untreated wastewater at dozens of sewage plants, often for years at a time.
The organisation has promised to tackle the problems after viewing the analysis, which it did not dispute.
Water companies across England and Wales frequently discharge sewage into rivers and seas. In England, sewage was spilled via storm overflows more than 300,000 times last year.
Peter Hammond, a former UCL professor who campaigns for Windrush Against Sewage, collated the data, which shows Welsh Water was discharging sewage before it reached its stipulated overflow level, which means it should have been treating it, but was not. He asked the Welsh Rivers Trust, as well as local anglers, for suggestions for outflows to look at.
Sewage systems overflow during periods of heavy rain, and companies are allowed to discharge when they reach a certain level to prevent waste backing up into homes, but not before.
The data, from 11 Welsh sewage plants, found that 10 released untreated waste before their stipulated overflow level had been reached. The worst-performing plant was Cardigan, which spilled for more than 200 days a year from 2019-22, and it almost never treated the sewage it was supposed to. The treatment plant spills into the Teifi estuary, where there is one of Europe’s largest populations of bottlenose dolphins. Welsh Water said in response that the nearby Poppit Sands beach had water rated “excellent”.
Hammond told the Guardian the dumping of sewage in the rare dolphin habitat “really upset me”. He added: “There are dolphins only in two places regularly in Wales and Scotland. And they’re dumping on one of them.”
This pattern is repeated in England. Earlier this year the high court heard that in 2022 52% of the raw sewage discharges from the 14,000 storm overflows that were monitored spilled more than 10 times. Eleven per cent discharged raw sewage more than 60 times. As such they had been in breach of the law – the urban wastewater (England and Wales) regulations 1994. The environmental watchdog in England recently declared that ministers might have broken the law over sewage dumping.
Welsh Water told the BBC it has between 40 and 50 wastewater treatment plants currently operating in breach of their permits, and that decisions on improvements were taken with customer bills in mind.
A spokesperson added: “Regarding Cardigan works specifically, we had already identified the issue there being linked to saltwater entering the works, which impacts the treatment process. We reported this to Natural Resources Wales (NRW) and agreed to undertake investment to improve the situation.” They are now investing a further £20m to ensure compliance with their discharge permit, and have disclosed the issues to NRW.
Hammond responded: “In the case of Cardigan, it’s been known for 10 years. And obviously, Welsh Water have not got to grips with it. You know, they say they’ve tried various solutions, but nothing’s worked.”
He said he believes they installed their current system in 2004 and have known about the problems for at least 10 years. “So you would have thought that by now, they would have put the money in.”
Huwel Manley, NRW’s head of operations for south-west Wales, told the BBC: “We have prosecuted Welsh Water on a number of instances for pollution events, just not for low flow spills as is the case here.
“But we are working with trying to set national guidance along with England so that we have a more standardised approach as to how and when we take that prosecution route.”
A Welsh Water spokesperson said: “We have over 5,000 environmental permits as Wales has some of the largest numbers of treatment works, pumping stations and storm overflows in the UK. We are continually monitoring and when we find issues, we share this data with regulators, investigate and deliver improvements. We are investing around £1m a day in improving our services.
“We always aim to resolve any issues as quickly as possible, to limit any impact for both the environment and our customers.”
Experts have cast doubt on groundwater studies that underpin the Northern Territory government’s decision to permit fracking in the Beetaloo basin, after methane bubbles were observed at hot springs in an area targeted for gas production.
In a new report, commissioned by the Environment Centre NT (ECNT), the scientists warn of “critical knowledge gaps” in baseline groundwater assessments conducted by the government in response to the Pepper inquiry into fracking.
Ninety percent of the territory’s water supply comes from groundwater while the territory’s hot springs support ecosystems and Indigenous cultural values.
“Our analysis shows that there are significant and critical gaps in the knowledge base underpinning fracking approvals in the Northern Territory,” said Matt Currell, a professor of environmental engineering at Griffith University and lead author of the report commissioned by the ECNT.
“This means that, at present, it is not possible to properly assess the risk of contamination and over-extraction of Northern Territory water due to fracking.
“Further studies are required to fill these knowledge gaps. To proceed on the current evidence base would be unwise, and may risk valuable aquifers, rivers and springs.”
Of particular concern, the authors found the government had failed to properly determine where the groundwater that flows to important springs comes from. They said the baseline studies lacked clear data on potential connectivity between shallow and deeper aquifers.
The authors said the government had also failed to develop a thorough profile of water quality throughout the groundwater systems. This would help establish whether there was a risk that saline water found at deeper levels, for example, could contaminate freshwater at shallow levels.
Currell also pointed to studies at hot springs on Tanumbirini station – an area targeted by gas companies.
“The discovery of methane bubbling to the surface at hot springs is particularly concerning, as it suggests connections between the shale gas layer to be targeted for fracking and surface water,” he said.
“This could become a pathway for contamination of water relied upon by communities in the Northern Territory.”
A spokesperson for the NT environment, parks and water security department defended the studies which, combined with the fracking inquiry, had made the Beetaloo region “the most extensively studied in the Territory across land, water and biodiversity, with a comprehensive focus on water”.
In a letter to the NT environment minister, Lauren Moss, six environment groups urged the government to put further fracking approvals and finalisation of a water allocation plan for the Beetaloo region on hold until it addressed “16 critical knowledge gaps” identified in Currell’s report and had its baseline studies peer-reviewed.
“We have repeatedly been assured by the NT government that the science underpinning its decision to greenlight fracking is sound,” the executive director of the ECNT, Kirsty Howey, said.
“Now we learn that baseline water studies are slipshod and seriously flawed, with holes so big you could drive a truck through them.“All fracking approvals and water allocations for fracking must be put on hold until the federal government ensures that the water trigger is in place, and baseline studies are completed and peer reviewed.”
The water trigger requires the environment minister to consider the impact of large coal and coal seam gas proposals on local water resources.
Djingili elder and director of Nurrdalinji Aboriginal Corporation, Elaine Sandy, said “we have a responsibility to protect water, for our communities and everyone living here”.
Djingili elder and director of the Nurrdalinji Aboriginal Corporation, Elaine Sandy. Photograph: Mike Bowers/Guardian Australia
“If fracking damages our water it can never be put right,” she said.
The letter calls for activities to be put on hold until the NT government established water advisory committees for the Beetaloo region and the federal government expanded the water trigger under national environmental laws.
The Albanese government has promised to expand the water trigger to include the shale gas in the Beetaloo basin as part of environmental reforms that have been delayed until next year. The Greens and independent MP Sophie Scamps have introduced their own bills to pressure the government to act before the end of the year.
The NT government’s spokesperson said investigations, led by CSIRO, would continue on the Hot Springs Valley located on Tanumbirini Station.
The spokesperson said a summary that synthesised the findings of the baseline assessments had been externally reviewed by two experts who sat on the panel of the inquiry into fracking.
They said the dataset for the Beetaloo region would continue to grow as a result of monitoring through government programs and by petroleum companies operating in the region.
The first time Leah Chan’s hair fell out, her heart pounded and she wept with fear.
It was June this year, and the 55-year-old worried that the thick clumps left in her hands were a sign of cancer. But her doctor suspected another cause: the water running through her pipes.
Chan lives in a small trailer home in the community of Buras, Louisiana, a sliver of land that embraces the edge of the Mississippi River on one side and the increasingly eroded Gulf coastline on the other.
Earlier this summer, she noticed a funny smell from the tap water. It left her morning coffee tasting salty, like a warm broth. Soon her skin broke out in rashes and officials told residents here that their water was not safe to drink.
Out on the southernmost frontiers of Plaquemines parish, residents have endured the brunt of extreme weather events for decades; Hurricane Katrina still lives in people’s memories and the scars of Hurricane Ida in 2021 remain visible on damaged buildings. But, for many, living with the indignities of a summer-long water crisis has been an unbearable burden.
“I feel like we’re living in a lost world,” Chan said. “Like nobody can reach us. Like nobody knows.”
A few weeks ago the water crisis in Plaquemines parish stirred national headlines as a so-called “wedge” of saltwater surged upriver, traveling up the Mississippi, threatening the drinking water for nearly a million people in the city of New Orleans and the suburbs that surround it.
Buras, the neighborhood that Leah Chan lives in, sits directly next to the Mississippi River.
During a year of extreme weather, which has seen record heat and wildfires in Louisiana, it is drought in America’s midwest that has caused the latest climate-related disaster here. As freshwater flowing down the Mississippi River falls to dangerous lows, saltwater from the Gulf of Mexico has pushed up into the channel, winding its way into public intake facilities and people’s homes – making their drinking water unusable, damaging appliances and threatening to corrode ageing infrastructure.
As officials say the threat to New Orleans has begun to subside, many residents of Plaquemines parish fear their situation will fade from public view, even as the prospect of frequent recurrence is exacerbated by the climate crisis and long-term solutions remain costly and unclear.
Chan often runs out of bottled water, and is forced to make long, expensive drives to a Dollar General store further up the river. Sometimes, there is none left and she is forced to use the salty water to prepare meals.
“I am tired of losing every time,” she said. “Fighting battles that we just can’t seem to win.”
Leah Chan noticed large amounts of her hair falling out during the timeframe that the tap water became full of salt and officials telling residents the water was unsafe to drink or cook with.The simple task of washing a sink full of dishes a cooking a pot of rice took nearly six bottles of water.
At a bottled water distribution center last week, on the grounds of a volunteer fire department station in Buras, a steady stream of residents arrived to pick up their daily allowance. The station goes through about 1,300 cases a day, said officials, with supplies running dry by the afternoon. Only two cases are allowed per household.
Patrick Hue, a 62 year-old lifelong resident, arrived in a small pickup truck between shifts out in the Gulf catching shrimp. He pointed to the rashes on the palms of his hands, his elbows and feet.
“Everything you get out the faucet is salt,” he said. “I bathe in it, then use the bottled water to rinse off.”
He had lived through saltwater intrusions before, including last year, but never for a period this long. Like many, he expressed frustration with local authorities over perceived indifference to the plight of the few thousand residents down the river.
“They don’t spend money in this part of the parish,” Hue said. “It’s been years since anyone paid any mind to the deterioration here.”
To illustrate the point, one of the parish’s five water treatment facilities in the nearby town of Port Sulphur had been out of operation since Hurricane Ida over two years ago.
It was only recently brought back online with temporary repairs, said the Plaquemines parish president, Keith Hinkley, who sat in his Port Sulphur office last week. He described the burdensome mitigation efforts put in place after last month’s state of emergency declaration: fresh water from upstream is being brought in by barges, then used to dilute salinity and pumped further downriver to treatment plants in affected communities.
A resident picks up cases of water at the Venice-Boothville fire department, one of several water and ice distribution locations in Plaquemines Parish.
Hinkley, elected less than a year ago, lives in the parish’s largest population center of Belle Chasse where the treatment plant is not yet inundated with saltwater. He argued forcefully that mitigation efforts had now made water safe to drink in the lower regions of his parish. “I’m drinking this water every day,” he said.
But further downriver, as the president was speaking, a drinking water advisory still remained in place. Official notices said residents should continue to rely on bottled water until reverse osmosis filtering machines at treatment plants had been fully installed. (The parish finally lifted its advisory this Wednesday, but just hours later issued another boil water advisory for parts of the region.)
Hinkley acknowledged that the parish could endure similar extremes next year too, but denied the effects of the climate crisis in causing drought, despite the overwhelming scientific evidence.
“I can’t agree with 100% of climate change,” Hinkley said. “But things change and shift.”
For now, most of New Orleans appears to have avoided harm – but the threat of prolonged drought and higher sea level rise combining to form another saltwater wedge looms over the region’s future.
In September, officials warned that the seawater could wind its way upriver to New Orleans by late October, potentially forcing the city of nearly 400,000 people to find alternate sources of water to drink.
However, these early estimates of the seawater’s upstream movement didn’t fully account for how the seawater would move across the river’s undulating floor. Because saltwater is heavier than freshwater, it moves slowly along the river’s bottom. “The river bottom looks like the surface of the moon,” said Ricky Boyett, chief of public affairs for the army corps, New Orleans district. “It’s ups and downs and craggy. Modeling of it looks like a mountain range.”
Any significant holes in the riverbed slows down the saltwater’s progress.
Patrick Hue at one of several water and ice distribution locations in Plaquemines parish.Hue has noticed his skin getting dry and cracking.
“At one point it was traveling about a mile and a half a day, then it reached this extremely deep part of the river. Before it can move on, it has to fill the hole up until it equalizes,” said Boyett.
Before the saltwater wedge made its way to Belle Chasse, a town of about 10,000 people, it fell into a 120ft hole in the river bottom. The town is still expected to experience saltwater in their drinking water by mid-November.
Another, deeper hole just downriver from New Orleans’ Westbank water intake is expected to further slow the progression of the saltwater, should it get that far.
Rain in the midwest also helped delay the saltwater’s upriver movement, said Julie Lesko, a senior service hydrologist with the National Weather Service New Orleans/Baton Rouge office. “It’s a small rise. It’s not projected to stay elevated,” she said.
The close call for New Orleans highlighted the difficulty of replacing an entire metropolitan area’s water source, a dilemma more cities across the US could face in a warming world. In the end, the area will have spent millions for temporary relief.
In late-September the army corps of engineers began to raise the height of an underwater levee it built in July, while leaving a 625ft-wide gap for ship traffic to resume. But the underwater levee, like other solutions put forward during the height of the threat, was a short-term fix. It’s expected to erode when the Mississippi River rises again.
The army corps would not provide details for the cost of this temporary fix.
In early-October, the army corps began to barge in water from upstream to help smaller communities near the mouth of the river dilute the saltwater. But that was never a realistic solution for New Orleans. The amount of water needed to quench the city’s thirst – about 165m gallons of water a day – could not be barged in or even produced via reverse osmosis, a costly option that would be difficult to scale.
As a result, New Orleans and its suburban neighbor, Jefferson parish, developed separate plans to build temporary pipelines to siphon water from upriver.
The 10-mile pipeline proposed by New Orleans was expected to cost up to $200m and take between two weeks and two months to build, according to an initial summary and bid of the project obtained by the Guardian through a public records request. Rental fees and maintenance could cost another $3m to $4m a month, plus the cost of fuel needed to run pumps to push water through the pipeline.
A similar project for Jefferson parish would cost $6.9m a month to run, plus nearly $1m to build and later take down, according to a proposal obtained through a public records request.
Jefferson parish began construction on their pipeline in early October. New Orleans is unlikely to move forward with its freshwater pipeline given the updated timeline of the saltwater intrusion. According to the latest estimates, salinity levels are not projected to rise significantly for most of the city, although the water board announced last week it is preparing for “higher-than-typical” levels of saltwater in the city’s west bank.
Jefferson Parish, in anticipation of the saltwater intrusion in the Mississippi River making it upstream, has started installing temporary, flexible piping to bring fresher water further upriver into their water system.
Nonetheless, said the New Orleans sewage and water board executive director, Ghassan Korban, the city will still review contract bids for a range of temporary mitigation solutions.
The disaster has brought into sharp focus the city’s ailing water infrastructure, which consists of about 1,600 miles of water distribution mains, a third of which are over a century old.
“Our system is beyond aged,” said Korban.
Officials do not know how many of the city’s water pipes are made of lead, which, as occurred in Flint, Michigan, can corrode when exposed to poorly treated water, and lead to dangerous toxins entering the system.
The city is in the midst of attempting to map its lead piping to reach a federal deadline by October of next year, and has contracted a non-profit group, BlueConduit, to carry out the work by digitizing thousands of old paper records to make data-driven estimations.
In an interview, BlueConduit co-founder Eric Schwartz, said the scale of the challenge in New Orleans was larger than many other jurisdictions due to disarray in the city’s record keeping.
Volunteer firefighter Mike Croft helps load ice into a resident’s car at the Venice-Boothville fire department.
“The thing that makes New Orleans one of the more challenging places in terms of data is not just a lack of information about older construction, but we also have a lack of information about newer construction due to rebuilding in the aftermath of recent natural disasters,” Schwartz said.
The army corps of engineers now projects that during the intrusion salinity levels in New Orleans will not go above the 250 parts per million (ppm), listed by the EPA as the point when most people will no longer want to drink the water because of the salty taste.
Nonetheless, Korban acknowledged that while 250ppm remained the working safe threshold, with so many unknowns in the system that number may need to be lowered, as the city monitors the situation closely with water testing for lead and other toxins that could leach due to corrosion.
“This is not a very known, definitive space where somebody can say: ‘if you have a certain material and the level is 100 [ppm] you will have this [outcome].’ Nobody can definitely give you any answers.”
He added: “I can’t give you the exact number, whether its going to be 100 or 150 [ppm]. But we’re not taking this issue lightly. We don’t want to take any chances.”
A spokeswoman for the sewage and water board later added that the city’s longstanding “corrosion control methods” were not believed to be affected by elevated salinity.
Venture Global LNG is building a giant liquid natural gas plant in Plaquemines parish which is currently employing 4-5,000 new people in the parish, which is putting additional strain on the water system.
In the long term, Korban acknowledged the effects of the climate crisis could well mean New Orleans will face even greater saltwater challenges in the years ahead, meaning “much, much greater” cost implications than the temporary solutions the city has examined.
“It’s our responsibility to be more adaptable to these circumstances and be ready for them,” he said.
Hinkley, the Plaquemines parish president, estimated that permanent solutions to future saltwater crises would cost about $200m to implement, including the repair and replacement of old parish infrastructure. While that figure may seem high, Hinkley argues that such an investment would be offset by a multibillion-dollar gargantuan liquified natural gas export facility being built by Venture Global in the parish, which could bring jobs, taxes and increase local business.
“That cost-to-benefit ratio is well worth it right there,” he said.
Not everyone in Plaquemines parish agrees with Hinkley’s analysis. It’s the biggest construction project in the parish’s history and the most expensive liquified gas export terminal in the US.
But the construction workers and water needs of the project put extra pressure on the parish during the current water crisis, said Byron Marinovich, a former Plaquemines parish council member and owner of Black Velvet Oyster Bar and Grill, in Buras. “Our parish population is only about 23,000 and they have four or five thousand additional people on top of that,” he said. “And we’re happy for the progress, or whatever you want to call it, but that really kind of hurt us. And even worse than that was we had trucks coming in pulling water out of the fire hydrants, municipal potable water, to make concrete.”
Byron Marinovich at his restaurant, Black Velvet.
Burning the gas exported from the facility is expected to emit roughly the same amount of greenhouse gases as 42 coal plants or 35.8m cars, according to the Sierra Club. Scientists have warned that climate change could increase the frequency of droughts in the midwest.
“What we’re seeing now with more frequent periods with reduced rainfall is what scientists predicted,” said Jason Knouft, a professor of biology at Saint Louis University and research scientist at the National Great Rivers Research and Education Center. “If I were to bet on it I’d say we’re going to see these low water events happening again and probably becoming more common.”
Not only does global warming increase air temperatures, it also causes more variability in precipitation. “That makes it difficult for water managers to prepare,” Knouft said. But water management will be a particularly important issue, as Mississippi River water levels not only impact drinking water in south Louisiana, but global food prices, as grain from the midwest is shipped downstream and around the world. “Water touches every part of our lives,” he said.
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I was hoping you would consider taking the step of supporting the Guardian’s journalism.
From Elon Musk to Rupert Murdoch, a small number of billionaire owners have a powerful hold on so much of the information that reaches the public about what’s happening in the world. The Guardian is different. We have no billionaire owner or shareholders to consider. Our journalism is produced to serve the public interest – not profit motives.
And we avoid the trap that befalls much US media – the tendency, born of a desire to please all sides, to engage in false equivalence in the name of neutrality. While fairness guides everything we do, we know there is a right and a wrong position in the fight against racism and for reproductive justice. When we report on issues like the climate crisis, we’re not afraid to name who is responsible. And as a global news organization, we’re able to provide a fresh, outsider perspective on US politics – one so often missing from the insular American media bubble.
Around the world, readers can access the Guardian’s paywall-free journalism because of our unique reader-supported model. That’s because of people like you. Our readers keep us independent, beholden to no outside influence and accessible to everyone – whether they can afford to pay for news, or not.
Birdsong hums over the rumble of Karl Wenner’s truck as it bounces along the dusty trails that weave through his property. For almost 100 years, this farm in southern Oregon grew barley, but now, amid the sprawling fields, there lies a wetland teeming with life.
Wenner installed the wetland on 70 of the farm’s 400 acres to help deal with phosphorus pollution that leaked into the adjacent Upper Klamath Lake after his land flooded each winter. With support from a team of scientists and advocates, the project has become a welcome sanctuary for migrating and native birds that are disappearing from the area.
Today, this corner ofLakeside Farms looks far different from a typical American farm. Waterfowl nest among the vegetation, joining pond turtles and even endangered native fish near rows of sprouting barley.
Looking out at the swaying cattails and wocus plants peeking through the water on an afternoon in June, Wenner beams: “This place wanted to be a wetland.”
Lakeside Farms features a wetland that has drawn harmful pollutants out of the soil and now serves as a sanctuary for migratory and native birds. Photograph: Gabrielle Canon/The Guardian
It’s a remarkable transformation and a promising example of a symbiotic solution to one of the world’s most pressing environmental problems.
Wenner, a co-owner of the land, hopes the farm won’t be unique for long. With an unprecedented amount of federal funding available through the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act and other government programs, Wenner and his partners are encouraging more farmers and ranchers to follow in their footsteps.
“We are demonstrating it is possible,” Wenner said. “We just have to do it on a gigantic scale.”
‘It’s a magical thing to see’
The Lakeside Farms wetland broke ground in 2021, flattening the barley fields and carving dikes and channels for water flows that would leave small artificial nesting islands. The water, produced from a natural spring on the property, quickly germinated seeds for marsh plants that had been dropped by birds and long left dormant. By the summer of 2022, the vegetation began to do its work, feeding fowl and cleaning the farm’s runoff, pumped within its banks rather than into the lake.
The plan, designed with both conservation and capitalization of the land in mind, took 70 acres of the farm out of production. But Wenner says his costs have largely been covered with government funds, and there’s a lot more to go around.
The benefits, Wenner says, have been almost immediate.
Wetlands serve as a natural sponge, soaking up harmful minerals and pollution before they seep into the watershed. Tucked between Upper Klamath Lake and an interstate highway, Lakeside Farms’ cropland leached high amounts of phosphorus – roughly five times above the amount allowed by regulations last February. It took mere months for the wetland to filter the sediment back to safe levels.
“You set the stage and Mother Nature takes over,” Wenner said. “It’s just a magical thing to see.”
Wenner is convinced the move has been a boon to business. The farm is no longer running afoul of regulations, while a plan to add a rotating wetland on other parts of its land will enable it to go organic, yielding “a much higher price for the crop”.
The Klamath River basin was once called the ‘Everglades of the west’. Today, extreme drought is putting strain on agricultural communities and wildlife alike. Photograph: Nathan Howard/AP
The project comes at a critical time for the region, where one the largest watersheds in the western US coexists with hundreds of farms and ranches. The area is home to rich biodiversity but has struggled as marshes and lakebeds were replaced by cattle ranges and crops.
The climate crisis is making the Klamath basin hotter and drier, creating stress for farmers and wildlife alike. Populations of migrating birds have plummeted, falling from roughly 5.8 million observed in 1958 to a peak of just 93,000 counted last year.
Many are finding hope in plans to demolish four dams along the Klamath River – the largest dam removal project in US history – bringing the ecosystem one step closer to recovery. But more solutions will be needed.
“We have the dams coming out and one of the biggest ecosystems in the county has the potential to be a functioning ecosystem again,” Wenner said. “It is a disrupted, screwed-up system – but this is fixable.”
The work is not without obstacles. “Our biggest challenge is where water is available to manage wetlands,” said Ed Contreras, a coordinator of the Intermountain West Joint Venture, an organization dedicated to building public-private partnerships to support bird habitats. He added that the Lakeside Farms project was an important case study.
“The way I see this program right now is it is a pilot,” he said. There was excitement across the region about the potential to expand, he said, “but it is going to take a lot of people coming together and thinking big picture to scale that up.”
Thousands of miles away, Paul Botts is confronting the same challenges. As the executive director of the Wetlands Initiative, a non-profit conservation organization in Chicago, he is determined to expand the use of what he calls “smart wetlands” across productive farm belts and hopes one day they will be as common as any other farming strategy.
“The ultimate goal here is that one day my children or grandchildren are driving around the midwest and every other farm field has one of these wetlands,” he said. He believes more widespread reliance on wetlands will be essential to meet conservation goals, and will also help stabilize food producers in an uncertain future.
“Our climate is changing and farmers are living it,” he said. “One of the best things we can do to adapt ourselves to that changing climate is to put small scattered wetlands back in our landscape.”
These natural systems help blunt climate catastrophes, holding water for dry times and slowing the speed of floods. “We view smart wetlands as an excellent example of a big-picture climate adaptation solution,” Botts added.
Wenner examines the pollen collected from bees at Lakeside Farms. Photograph: Gabrielle Canon/The Guardian
Back in Klamath, Wenner is checking on his bees. He pulls out a small tray from one of his boxed hives, marveling at the collected pollen as the insects casually come and go. Soon he will send it off to a lab in Belgium that analyzes what the bees have retrieved to give him information about what’s taking seed at Lakeside Farms.
“There are a huge number of plants growing out there and the bees are going to tell us what they are,” he said. Already the results have been exciting. After decades, the once monoculture land is bursting with biodiversity, both plants and animals alike.
Wenner gets emotional when he talks about the change. A strategy to fall in line with regulations sprouted an opportunity. “I read the news and it is one environmental disaster after another,” he said. “But I always hoped that maybe we can be smart enough to fix this stuff.
“Now I am learning that you can,” he added. Wenner hopes the natural systems will be given a chance. “We just have to figure out how to do it.”
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I was hoping you would consider taking the step of supporting the Guardian’s journalism.
From Elon Musk to Rupert Murdoch, a small number of billionaire owners have a powerful hold on so much of the information that reaches the public about what’s happening in the world. The Guardian is different. We have no billionaire owner or shareholders to consider. Our journalism is produced to serve the public interest – not profit motives.
And we avoid the trap that befalls much US media – the tendency, born of a desire to please all sides, to engage in false equivalence in the name of neutrality. While fairness guides everything we do, we know there is a right and a wrong position in the fight against racism and for reproductive justice. When we report on issues like the climate crisis, we’re not afraid to name who is responsible. And as a global news organization, we’re able to provide a fresh, outsider perspective on US politics – one so often missing from the insular American media bubble.
Around the world, readers can access the Guardian’s paywall-free journalism because of our unique reader-supported model. That’s because of people like you. Our readers keep us independent, beholden to no outside influence and accessible to everyone – whether they can afford to pay for news, or not.
LA PAZ (Reuters) – A prolonged drought in Bolivia and one of the hottest winters on record is threatening to leave parts of the South American country short of water, including in the high-altitude city of El Alto, some 4,000 meters above sea level.
Climate change is affecting glaciers in the Bolivian Andes that provide fresh water to the surrounding wetlands, springs and dams, with residents of El Alto, perched above La Paz, now only able to access water at certain times of the day.
Bertha Apaza, a local resident, said the extreme heat was a clear sign of shifting climates that had now forced the city to ration water use.
“We have schedules to receive water, we don’t have enough to cook or wash clothes, much less take a shower,” she said.
Bolivia has experienced some of the most extreme temperatures in August and September, which are usually temperate months.
Neighboring Brazil, Paraguay and Peru have also experienced unusual late winter and early spring heat waves, with temperatures at all-time records in the Southern Hemisphere, including large parts of southeastern Australia.
Some once fertile areas across the western region of Bolivia have been reduced to dust. Many of those living in El Alto, a city of around one million people, come from farming communities raising livestock and planting vegetables to survive.
The dry spell has taken a heavy toll on Catalina Mancilla, who recently saw some of her farm animals die of thirst, before the local government set up a community water tank.
“We can now drink water and my animals will also drink enough water,” she said.
Authorities remain confident that water reserves will last until December when the rainy season usually arrives, though hundreds of thousands of families and vast swathes of crop and cattle farmland has already been impacted.
Members of the scientific community warn the situation could become critical with the El Nino weather pattern set to arrive in December, potentially altering the forecast and turning up the temperature.
“We are facing a very, I don’t want to use the word dangerous, but worrying situation,” said Oscar Paz, an expert in climate change and professor at the Universidad Mayor de San Andres, adding the El Nino could last for two years.
El Nino can prompt extreme weather events from wildfires to cyclones and droughts in some areas and more rainfall in others.
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) -Mexico’s president announced that he expects to have a new action plan in the next couple weeks to better address a toxic spill that fouled a river nine years ago and was blamed on one of the country’s top mining and transportation companies.
President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador told reporters at a regular government press conference that funds allocated by conglomerate Grupo Mexico for cleanup and remediation appeared to be insufficient, adding that meetings over the next few days should yield a new “proposal” that officials will present to the company.
“We’re resolving it, looking for options and alternatives,” he said.
Later on Wednesday, Grupo Mexico said in a statement that remediation work in the river succeeded and is backed by scientific studies.
Last week, Lopez Obrador’s environment ministry called the company’s remediation efforts insufficient and stated that the Sonora River, located in northern Mexico, still showed the presence of contaminants from the spill, nearly a decade after what many consider to be one of the country’s worst ecological disasters.
Grupo Mexico, the country’s top copper producer, dismissed the ministry’s assertions as false.
“The alleged findings from tests presented last week have no link to the 2014 event. They omit current sources of pollution such as illegal mining (and) the discharge of untreated sewage,” according to the company statement.
The company also pointed to a government resolution from last May that it said showed that the river’s water quality had already returned to its pre-spill levels.
CANBERRA (Reuters) -Australia’s weather bureau said on Friday that areas of severe rainfall deficiency had expanded after the driest September on record, putting farm production in one of the world’s largest agricultural exporters at risk.
Australia is in the grip of an El Nino weather phenomenon that typically brings hotter, drier weather, and temperatures soared to record highs last month.
Rain across parts of southeastern Australia in recent days has helped some farmers, but the country’s wheat harvest has been downgraded and the Australian government says average farm incomes will likely fall 41% in the 2023–24 financial year.
The Bureau of Meteorology said average nationwide September rainfall was 70.8% below the 1961–1990 average.
For the five months since May, all states and territories have developed areas of rainfall deficiencies, including large parts of south-west Western Australia and much of the country’s south-east, the bureau said.
“Areas of deficiency have generally expanded and become more severe, and new areas have emerged, including along the West Coast district in South Australia (and) in the Central district in Victoria,” it said.
“September soil moisture was below average (in the lowest 30% of all years since 1911) for much of Australia, away from the north and central inland areas.”
Data from New South Wales showed only 3.5% of the state was in drought, but another 28.2% was in the weaker drought-affected category.
In its latest long-range forecast this week, the bureau said there was a 60% to 80% chance of below median rainfall for much of western, northern and southern Australia between November and January next year.
However, small areas of New South Wales and southern Queensland are more likely to have above median rainfall, it said.
LA PAZ (Reuters) – Under a scorching sun, more than three hundred Bolivians on Friday marched to a dusty plain near the Incachaca dam that overlooks the city of La Paz, gathering to pray for rain and an end to a severe drought that has threatened their water supply.
The ten reservoirs that supply La Paz – one of the country’s largest cities with about 2.2 million inhabitants – only contain 135 days of water combined, Bolivia’s state-owned water company EPSAS has warned.
Hoisting umbrellas to stave off the heat, women wearing traditional bowler hats and colorful skirts walked alongside young men playing drums and native flutes.
Once there, they knelt, praying in Aymara, Quechua as well as Spanish, their eyes tightly closed with hands extended to the heavens.
“We have come to the summit to cry out for rain,” said Susana Laruta, a member of a local evangelical Christian church.
Without significant rainfall, the high-altitude city’s water supplies will be exhausted by February. The rainy season is due to start in December but the latest forecasts are not encouraging.
Only scarce rain is expected due to the weather phenomenon known as El Nino, the national meteorological agency has said.
El Nino, a warming of water surface temperatures in the eastern and central Pacific Ocean, is linked to extreme weather conditions.
“Climate change is what’s provoking these changes,” said Bernardo Vedia, a local Methodist bishop.
“That’s why we’ve come here to join together in prayer to call out to God so that rain will fall over the earth,” he said.
GENEVA (Reuters) – The World Meteorological Organization said on Thursday that the hydrological cycle was increasingly out of balance due to climate change and made a call for a fundamental policy shift towards better monitoring.
“We are seeing much heavier precipitation episodes and flooding. And at the opposite extreme, more evaporation, dry soils and more intense droughts,” said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas in a statement as the U.N. agency released its State of Global Water Resources report for 2022.
It showed that over 50% of global catchment areas experienced deviations from normal river discharge conditions, with most of them drier than normal, citing China’s Yangtze River as an example.
On the other extreme, it cited floods in Pakistan that killed more than 1,700 people last year.
“…Far too little is known about the true state of the world’s freshwater resources. We cannot manage what we do not measure,” the WMO said in a statement.
The water report is only the second such analysis done by the WMO and includes data from large river basins, including river discharge, groundwater, evaporation, soil moisture and reservoir inflow.
CLEARWATER, Fla. — A number of local organizations have teamed up to kick off their biggest cleanup event of the year, and it’s good timing given the tornado damage left behind.
‘The Big Cleanup Clearwater’ formally kicked off on Friday morning and a number of cleanup events will be held across different locations in Clearwater throughout the weekend.
According to the City of Clearwater, this is the area’s biggest coordinated cleanup event of the year.
The cleanup is a coordinated effort between the City of Clearwater, Keep Pinellas Beautiful, Ocean Allies, Visit St. Pete/Clearwater, and Amplify Clearwater.
Participants are asked to sign up online for a location and a time slot. Awards will be given out for the heaviest amount of trash collected, the youngest volunteer, and the oldest volunteer. The awards will be presented at a city council meeting in December.
The goal of the cleanup is to keep trash and debris from getting into the ocean and waterways.
