A view shows a bridge over Sidi El Barrak dam with depleted levels of water, in Nafza, west of the capital Tunis, Tunisia
Tunisia will cut off water supplies to citizens for seven hours a night in response to the country’s worst drought on record, state water distribution company SONEDE said in a statement on Friday.
The country’s agriculture ministry earlier introduced a quota system for potable water and banned its use in agriculture until Sept. 30, as the country battles with a drought that is now in its fourth year.
SONEDE said in a statement that the water will be cut off daily from 9 p.m until 4 a.m, with immediate effect.
Mosbah Hlali, its head, said the drought in the country was unprecedented due to the scarcity of rain during four consecutive years, and called on Tunisians to understand the decision which it attributed to climate change.
Tunisia recorded a drop in its dam capacity to around 1 billion cubic meters, or 30% of the maximum, senior agriculture ministry official Hamadi Habib said.
The agriculture ministry has also banned the use of potable water to wash cars, water green areas and clean streets and public places. Violators face a fine and imprisonment for a period of between six days to six months.
Residents said Tunisian authorities have been cutting off drinking water at night in some areas of the capital and other cities for the last two weeks in a bid to cut consumption, a move that has sparked widespread anger.
The new decision threatens to fuel social tension in a country whose people suffer from poor public services, high inflation and a weak economy.
The Sidi Salem Dam in the north of the country, a key provider of drinking water to several regions, has declined to only 16% of its maximum capacity of 580 million cubic meters, official figures showed.
Tunisia’s grain harvest will be “disastrous”, with the drought-hit crop declining to 200,000-250,000 tonnes this year from 750,000 tonnes in 2022, senior farmers union official Mohamed Rjaibia told Reuters on Thursday.
Coral eDNA has been accurately detected in seawater samples, and this has huge implications for coral reef conservation, says researchers.
By Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) Graduate University
School in great numbers at Rapture Reef, French Frigate Shoals, Papahānaumokuākea National Marine Monument (image from NOAA)
Researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have developed a method to measure coral biodiversity through extracting the environmental DNA (or eDNA) from a liter of surface seawater collected from above a reef. The method has been confirmed to work through observations made by scientific divers in the same areas of ocean. The research, conducted in collaboration with the Okinawa Prefecture Environmental Science Center and University of Tokyo, was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. This has paved the way for large-scale comprehensive surveys of reef-building coral to take place and removes the reliance of direct observations made through scientific scuba diving or snorkeling.
“Beautiful coral reefs in subtropical and tropical seas account for only 0.2% of the entire ocean,” said co-author Prof. Nori Satoh, Principal Investigator of OIST’s Marine Genomics Unit. “However, they are the most biodiverse areas of the oceans, home to about 30% of all marine life. Reef-building corals play a key role in creating coral reefs, but recent global warming and other factors have caused bleaching, and many coral reefs are in danger of disappearing.”
To conserve and protect the coral reefs, it’s important to first know which coral exists on the reef and how the make-up of a reef is changing over time. Previously, the only way to effectively survey a reef was through divers and snorkelers directly observing the coral and recording the species and the changes over time. This was time consuming, expensive, and labor intensive. But researchers are now utilizing the DNA that living creatures release into the environment, through skin, waste products, and mucus. By extracting this eDNA from the seawater and analyzing it, a clear picture of the organisms that inhabit that part of the ocean can be found, without ever having to enter the water.
Reef-building, or hard, coral are vital parts of coral reefs. It is estimated that there are approximately 1,300 species of reef-building corals in 236 genera worldwide. These corals release mucus into the surrounding seawater, which contains a portion of DNA. In 2021, researchers from OIST and the University of Tokyo succeeded in developing tools that amplify and identify the DNA of 45 genera of reef-building coral.
Now, the researchers have tested whether these tools are effective and accurate by conducting a large-scale survey of the ocean surrounding Okinawa using both the eDNA method and scientific divers. This involved direct visual observation by two divers to identify dominant coral genera and collecting two or three one-liter bottles of surface seawater at each site. Seawater was filtered as soon as possible to fix environmental DNA trapped in the filters and the filters were brought back to the OIST laboratory for analysis. Over a four-month period, from early September to late December 2021, 62 sites from around the main Okinawa Island were surveyed and two to four dominant coral genera at each reef were recorded.
“We found that the eDNA analysis matched that of the direct scientific observations with more than 91% accuracy,” said OIST Research Scientist, Dr. Koki Nishitsuji, first author of the paper. “In fact, 41 out of the 62 sites were identical. The eDNA method indicated the presence of five dominant coral genera at all 62 sites surveyed. What’s more the results of the environmental DNA method suggest the presence of corals never before recorded along the coast of Okinawa.”
The eDNA method requires complex sequencing information, and due to this, only 45 of the estimated 236 genera can currently be detected. With more information, the effectiveness of the eDNA method will increase. And, although further research is needed, the eDNA method may be able to indicate the presence of corals that are difficult to detect by direct observation.
Cooling towers release heat generated by boiling water reactors at Xcel Energy’s Nuclear Generating Plant on Oct. 2, 2019, in Monticello, Minn. Minnesota regulators said Thursday, March 16, 2023, that they’re monitoring the cleanup of a leak of 400,000 gallons of radioactive water from Xcel Energy’s Monticello nuclear power plant in late November 2022. The company said there’s no danger to the public.
Water containing a radioactive material has leaked for a second time from a nuclear plant near Minneapolis and the plant will be shut down, but there is no danger to the public, the plant’s owner said Thursday.
The new leak, announced a day after Xcel Energy says it was discovered, was found to be coming from a temporary fix to the original leak, the company said in a statement. This time, the leak is anticipated to be in the hundreds of gallons.
“While the leak continues to pose no risk to the public or the environment, we determined the best course of action is to power down the plant and perform the permanent repairs immediately,” said Chris Clark, president of Xcel Energy–Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota. “We are continuing to work with and inform our state, federal, city and county leaders in the process.”
After the first leak was found in November, Xcel Energy made a short-term fix to capture water from a leaking pipe and reroute it back into the plant for re-use. The solution was designed to prevent new tritium from reaching the groundwater until installation of a replacement pipe during a regularly scheduled outage in mid-April, the company said.
However, monitoring equipment indicated Wednesday that a small amount of new water from the original leak had reached the groundwater. Operators discovered that, over the past two days, the temporary solution was no longer capturing all of the leaking water, Xcel Energy said.
The leaked water remains contained on-site and has not been detected in any local drinking water, Xcel Energy said.
Tritium is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen that occurs naturally in the environment and is a common by-product of nuclear plant operations. It emits a weak form of beta radiation that does not travel far and cannot penetrate human skin, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency and Minnesota Department of Health released a statement Thursday saying they were told of the new leak Thursday afternoon and that it is ongoing. The agencies said they will continue to monitor groundwater samples and will inform the public if there is an imminent risk.
Minnesota regulars said last week that Xcel Energy voluntarily notified state agencies and reported the leak of tritium to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission soon after it was confirmed in November. The amount of leaked material never reached a threshold requiring public notification and they waited to make a public announcement until they had more information, officials said.
Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety with the Union of Concerned Scientists, told The Associated Press last week that a significant health risk only would occur if people consumed fairly high amounts of tritium. That risk is contained if the plume stays on the company’s site, which Xcel Energy and Minnesota officials said is the case.
Some businesses, including Starbucks in Spring Garden, were unable to use tap water for drinks or ice earlier Sunday after the city of Philadelphia advised residents to not drink tap water following a chemical spill in Bucks County.
At Kite & Key at Callowhill Street, management said they went out and bought cases of bottled water for their customers. But they ran out at around 4:30 p.m.
They’re now serving tap water again following the city’s second advisory, deeming the water to be safe to drink through Monday night.
Kite & Key was fairly busy Sunday afternoon.
Many customers were drinking bottled water, with some concerned about ice being used in drinks.
A couple CBS Philadelphia spoke to said they won’t be drinking any tap water just to be safe.
“They just brought us this water, but the first thing in my head was like, ‘Oh it’s probably tap water.’ So I’ll steer clear of that for now,” Kalli Kaney, a Fishtown resident, said.
“I’m worried about people that don’t know,” Clun Clari, another Fishtown resident, said. “For instance, people that don’t get the alerts on their phone. I didn’t get an alert, but she did.”
The first advisory also warned against cooking with tap water in affected areas, but CBS Philadelphia did not hear any reports of restaurants closing.
An eagle takes flight near the Shiawassee River. The Shiawassee National Wildlife Refuge and its extensive wetland restorations have benefitted from settlement money. Eagles, ducks, herons, fish, otters, many other kinds of wildlife flourish because of restored sites.
A new phase of restoration along polluted areas stretching from Midland to Saginaw to Bay City and beyond is up for public scrutiny. This multi-million dollar plan is likely some of the last new projects being funded by two major settlements with corporate polluters.
Federal, state, and tribal trustees have come up with an extensive plan to spend some of the last of the money from those two huge settlements.
“This round of restoration that we’re asking for public comment on now involves ten new projects,” said Lisa Williams with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS).
The settlement money comes from Dow and GM.
The Dow Chemical Company settled a case in 2020. It agreed to clean-up more than a hundred years of dioxin pollution and restore the Tittabawassee River. The second case was settled with General Motors in 1998. Three GM plants had polluted the Saginaw River and Lake Huron’s Saginaw Bay with PCBs and other toxic chemicals.
“Back in 1998, we valued the settlement with General Motors at about $30 million and this more recent settlement with Dow at $77 million,” Williams explained.
That’s a lot of money, but the bulk of it went to cleaning up or capping the pollution. Some of the money has gone toward restoring natural areas.
These ten new projects propose restorations that stretch through one of the state’s major river areas.
Think of the Michigan mitten map. Several rivers flow into crook of the thumb. The Tittabawassee flows through Midland and heads toward Saginaw. It joins the Shiawassee and together they become the Saginaw River. Then it’s on to Bay City and Lake Huron’s Saginaw Bay.
At the Shiawassee National Wildife Refuge, USFWS wildlife biologist Eric Dunton points out areas planned for restoration and others that already have been restored.
“If it weren’t for the settlement dollars, we would never basically have the opportunity to do this restoration project,” Dunton said as he looked over nearly one thousand acres of recently restored wetlands.
The river system and Lake Huron’s Saginaw Bay are a major stop over for migratory birds such as ducks and geese as well as many non-game species such as egrets, herons, and songbirds.
The newly proposed projects include improvements at nature centers, game areas, state parks and preserves at spots along the rivers and the bay.
Some of these new restoration projects are on former industrial sites or farmland that was once wetlands.
“Now we’re bringing back some of those lands to be habitat and wetland habitats are incredibly important and productive for ducks and geese and bald eagles and mink and turtles and frogs. All kinds of wildlife are attracted and use wetlands,” Lisa Williams said.
That impact reaches beyond just the wetlands.
Brian Keenan-Lechel is the Director of Saginaw County Parks and Recreation. On top of an 85 foot high mound over a closed landfill, we watched a small herd of deer running across the brown grass, startling a group of six great blue herons. We might have been standing on a covered up dump, but the vista was impressive.
“It provides a really unique view of the 18,000 plus protected acres to our south and southwest. Turning around reveals downtown and old town Saginaw’s skyline,” Keenan-Lechel said.
He was giving a brief tour the soon to be open Saginaw River Headwaters Rec Area. It’s a cooperative effort between the county and the Michigan Department of Natural Resources.
Most of this site 334 acre site was once a factory.
“Most recently for over a nearly 100 years SMI, Saginaw Malleable Iron factory, which was an arm of General Motors. Prior to that, it had ties to lumbering to salt and coal mining, basically a microcosm of the 200 year industrialization that the Midwest saw,” Keenan-Lechel said.
One of the ten proposed projects is an ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) compliant fishing platform along the Saginaw River. Fishing there and in the other rivers of the Saginaw Bay watershed just might improve because of some of the restoration projects that are planned.
“Fish from the river systems here can use these marshes to spawn in and for their young to grow up safe so that they can move back out into the rivers and improve fish populations in rivers like the Shiawassee and the Cass,” said Lisa Williams with the USFWS.
Some of the settlement money has been set aside for maintaining restored natural areas. But much of what’s left of the settlement money has been set aside for these ten new projects if they’re approved.
“Some of the projects were not too sure of the cost yet. So we haven’t used up the entire $5.75 million out of the estimated project costs that we have available now,” Williams said.
The draft plans for the ten projects along the rivers in Saginaw Bay watershed are online. People have until March 27th to comment by email t.river.nrda@fws.gov on the proposed projects.
Ujang delivers water to customers in the poor neighborhoods of North Jakarta. His cart is a crucial supply line to communities beset by water insecurity.
The last time the United Nations hosted a conference dedicated to global water supply and sanitation the world looked vastly different. Half as many people were alive. China’s economy was smaller than the United Kingdom’s. And a year colder than the 20th century average was still possible.
It was 1977, a decade of global environmental awakening, when the nations of the world gathered in an Argentine port city to call attention to the vulnerability of water bodies to pollution and overuse. The Mar del Plata conference aimed for wiser management of an essential resource in order to improve environmental health and “promote human dignity and happiness.”
Forty-six years later, the challenges remain. Environmental health and human dignity are again on the agenda. But achieving progress is impeded by growth in farm and factory output and by a warming planet that is unleashing hellacious droughts, ruinous floods, and punishing storms. Industrial farms gulp water and spit out pollutants. Glaciers from the Alps to the Andes are shriveling, drying out alpine towns.
Delegates arriving this week in New York City to take part in the UN’s second international water conference will do so in more frenzied circumstances. Eight billion people now inhabit the planet. China, hoovering raw materials for decades, is the world’s second largest economy, its output more than five times bigger than the UK’s. And global temperatures march steadily upwards.
“The world is a much riskier place than in 1977,” said Quentin Grafton, a water scholar at the Australian National University.
Part pep rally, part trade show, part performance review, the UN Water Conference is pitched by its co-hosts, the governments of the Netherlands and Tajikistan, as an opportunity for the world to recommit to ambitious goals of safely managed water and sanitation for all people and ecosystems.
The centerpiece of the conference, which runs from March 22 to 24, is the “water action agenda,” a compilation of voluntary commitments from national governments, nonprofits, businesses, and intergovernmental agencies. Together these commitments extend beyond the conference walls, pushing leaders to be more careful, inclusive water stewards in the years ahead.
“It’s not what happens in three days,” Grafton said about the goals of the conference. “It’s what happens afterward.”
Immediate changes are unlikely. It is not the Bretton Woods conference, the post-World War Two assembly that established the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, thereby reconstructing the global financial system. It is not the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, which resulted in UN conventions on three major environmental issues: biodiversity, climate change, and desertification.
The water conference is more akin to the 1972 UN Conference on the Environment, which, in a form of soft power, elevated the health of the world’s ecosystems to a place of international prominence.
The legacy of the water conference will be more piecemeal than its landmark predecessors, its success determined by the dedication of national governments, businesses, financial institutions, and nonprofits to carry out their commitments. More than 90 government ministers and eight presidents or prime ministers are scheduled to attend the conference.
“The political dimension is a huge part of the solution to the water crisis,” said Federico Properzi, chief technical adviser of UN-Water.
Reducing carbon emissions would relieve the mounting pressure of weather extremes. But because negotiations over emissions reductions take place elsewhere, the conference will instead emphasize ways to adapt to a fevered planet.
Marisa Escobar of the Stockholm Environment Institute works on watershed management in basins across the globe. Many areas struggle to pay for adaptation projects. More financing options and assistance would help, she said.
The action agenda commitments display the breadth and depth of the world’s water challenges. Some of the 419 commitments submitted through Sunday are strikingly local and contained. The nonprofit group ASDD intends to reforest the banks of Burundi’s Mugere River to prevent erosion. Stora Enso Oyj, a Finnish wood products company, pledges to reduce its wastewater discharge.
These benefits are welcomed in their place, but the conference is not centered on a series of small steps. Organizers are looking for big “game changer” commitments that will alter the trajectory of water governance and use.
Charles Iceland of the World Resources Institute is tracking the commitments. He said that game changers will be those supported by money or political power, or those that can be applied at scale, across multiple areas.
“They have a lot of money behind them, or they have big entities behind them that have produced good outcomes in the past,” Iceland said.
Getting Back on Track
The conference is taking place at the midpoint of two UN initiatives. One is rather obscure: the International Decade for Action on Water for Sustainable Development. The other is the driving force for global poverty-reduction efforts: the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which have a 2030 deadline.
There have been undoubted successes for water and sanitation. Billions more people today have access to safe drinking water than two decades ago. But the failures are just as glaring. As of 2020, about 2 billion people do not have safely managed drinking water. Even more people lack the same level of sanitation service. Wetlands are under constant threat of destruction and water withdrawals from rivers and aquifers are, in many areas, unsustainable.
“We can’t continue that track for another 46 years,” said Grafton, who co-authored a review of progress and shortfalls for water since Mar del Plata. In short, many of the issues that were then identified as priorities — data collection, pollution management, wetlands protection — remain unresolved.
Chasms exist between countries. Whereas most North Americans and Europeans have high-quality piped water service, fewer than three in 10 Africans enjoy the same comforts. Differences within countries can be just as stark. Urban dwellers are more connected than their rural counterparts.
Though the UN Environment Program says that more water resources data is being collected, gaps identified in 1977 persist. Many countries still do not regularly monitor key indicators like water quality in rivers and lakes, access to sanitation, and the effectiveness of wastewater treatment.
This adds up to the world being far removed from its intended track. According to the UN, progress needs to accelerate four-fold if the ambitious SDGs for water, sanitation, and hygiene are to be achieved by 2030.
Will the water conference change the course? The schedule is stuffed to the point of claustrophobia. UN climate conventions unfold across two weeks of negotiations, panel discussions, and dialogues. The water conference, by contrast, is packed into three days. Official presentations take place in the UN General Assembly. But the program of side events taking place within the UN complex unfolds across 32 pages. The side events at locations elsewhere in New York take up 62 pages.
The atmosphere of swirling possibility is part of the appeal. Attention is a form of power, and conference organizers and observers hope that a short period of intense focus can be the spark to rally national governments and financial institutions to take on the big challenges of water for years to come.
“To keep it alive we have to keep reaching out to these actors and seeing how they’re progressing and trying to keep them accountable,” Iceland said. “So it’s not just a laundry list and collects dust in future years.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom talks during a news conference from a farm in Dunnigan, Calif., Friday, March 24, 2023. Newsom announced an end to some drought restrictions and calls for water conservation, following a series of winter storms have dramatically improved the state’s water supply outlook
DUNNIGAN, Calif. (AP) — California Gov. Gavin Newsom ended some of the state’s water restrictions on Friday because a winter of relentless rain and snow has replenished the state’s reservoirs and eased fears of a shortage after three years of severe drought.
Newsom was careful not to declare the drought to be over, noting water shortages remain in the Klamath River basin along the California-Oregon line and in densely populated Southern California, which relies heavily on the struggling Colorado River system to supply millions of people.
But Newsom did say he would stop asking people to voluntarily cut their water use by 15%, a request he first made nearly two years ago while standing at the edge of a nearly dry Lopez Lake in the state’s Central Coast region — a lake that today is so full from recent storms it is almost spilling over.
“None of us could have imagined … a few months ago that we’d be where we are today,” Newsom said Friday from a farm northwest of Sacramento that has flooded some of its fields with excess water so it will seep underground and refill groundwater basins. “Are we out of the drought? Mostly — but not completely.”
Newsom’s call for voluntary conservation had mixed results. Californians did reduce their water use, but only by 6.2% overall, according to data from the State Water Resources Control Board. Newsom never ordered statewide, mandatory water restrictions — but he did require water agencies to impose some limits on their customers.
Friday, Newsom said he was easing those rules. That change will impact people in different ways depending on where they live. For most people, it means they won’t be limited to watering their lawns on only certain days of the week or at certain times of the day. Other restrictions will remain in place indefinitely, including a ban on watering decorative grass for businesses.
“We’ve got to conserve as a way of life,” Newsom said.
Newsom could ease some restrictions in part because California’s reservoirs are now so full that cities will get more than double the amount of drinking water this year compared to a previous allocation announced last month. Now, water districts that serve 27 million people will get at least 75% of the water they requested from state supplies. Last year, they only got 5% as California endured three of the driest years ever since modern recordkeeping began in 1896.
“This wet winter, which has led to a large increase in our (water) allocation, is not a signal that we can relax,” said Adel Hagekhalil, general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California that supplies water to 19 million people. “It is an alarm to act and accelerate our efforts to respond to rapidly changing conditions, including conservation, storage, recycling and reuse.”
Last week the district ended mandatory drought restrictions for about 7 million people who rely almost exclusively on state supplies for their water.
California and the western United States have been in an extended drought for about two decades, a period of abnormal dryness punctuated by occasional intense seasons of storms. It would be tough for a governor “of a large, diverse state that has very diverse water supplies and water demands” to say when a drought has started or ended, said Jay Lund, vice director for the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California, Davis.
Lund said the drought is over from many perspectives in California, including urban water supply and reservoirs. But it’s not over for the state’s fragile ecosystems and the groundwater aquifers that were depleted during recent drought years.
“We might never recover them completely,” he said.
Three years of little rain or snow in California had depleted reservoirs to the point the state couldn’t generate electricity from hydroelectric power plants. It dried up wells in rural areas and state officials had to truck in water supplies for some communities. And it reduced the flow of the state’s major rivers and streams, killing off endangered fish and other species.
But since December, no less than 12 powerful storms have hit California, packing so much rain and snow that meteorologists call them “atmospheric rivers.” These storms have flooded homes, closed ski resorts and trapped people in mountain communities for days with no electricity, prompting emergency declarations from President Joe Biden.
“That kind of whiplash is something that we’ve experienced in a very intense way in California that I think is unique across the western U.S.,” said Karla Nemeth, director of the California Department of Water Resources.
Water has been steadily pouring into the state’s reservoirs since December. Of California’s 17 major reservoirs, 12 of them are either at or above their historical averages for this time of year.
And more water is coming. Statewide, the amount of snow piled up in the mountains is already 223% above the April 1 average — the date when the snowpack is typically at its peak. Most of that snow will melt in the coming months, flowing into reservoirs and posing more flooding threats downstream.
Researchers analysing wastewater say that routine monitoring at sewage treatment works could provide a powerful early warning system for the next flu or norovirus epidemic, alerting hospitals to prepare and providing public health agencies with vital health information.
In the first large scale and comprehensive wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) study in the UK, scientists at the University of Bath, Bangor University and the UK Heath Security Agency analysed wastewater from 10 cities for both chemical and biological markers of health, including pesticides, pharmaceuticals and disease-causing viruses.
They collected samples from each location at hourly intervals over 24 hours on nine days in November 2021. The samples for each day were pooled before being processed and analysed for trace chemical markers using mass spectrometry techniques.
The samples were also analysed to detect any genetic material from viruses (SARS-CoV-2, norovirus and adenovirus). The total sampling catchment area equated to a population of around 7 million people.
Detecting trace chemicals
Using highly sensitive chemical analysis that could distinguish between very similar markers, the researchers were able to tell whether pharmaceuticals had passed through the human body or had been directly disposed into the wastewater system.
They could also identify whether chemicals such as pesticides had been ingested through food or had washed into the wastewater system from agricultural land.
The team observed that differences in levels of chemical markers were mostly dependent on the size of population in the catchment area, however there were some outliers.
For example in one city, there was a much higher concentration of ibuprofen found in the water, compared with other cities, suggesting direct disposal from industrial waste.
Identifying disease outbreaks
The researchers detected localised outbreaks of norovirus, Covid-19 and flu, but could also correlate them with spikes in usage of over-the-counter painkillers such as paracetamol.
The results indicate that analysing wastewater on a large scale in this way, dubbed wastewater-based epidemiology, could spot new outbreaks of diseases in communities early on, before large numbers were admitted into hospitals.
Professor Barbara Kasprzyk-Hordern, from the Water Innovation Research Centre and Institute for Sustainability at the University of Bath, led the chemistry work on the project. She said: “Most people reach for the paracetamol when they first get sick, and try to treat their illnesses at home.
“So looking for large spikes in paracetamol use could give an early indication that there may be an infectious disease outbreak in the community.
“We can also detect markers of inflammation and so look for any possible links of poor health with exposure to harmful chemicals, such as pesticides from food or industrial sources of chemicals.
“Our study has shown that only 10 daily samples from 10 wastewater treatment plants are needed to provide anonymous and unbiased information on the health of 7 million people — this is much cheaper and faster than any clinical screening process.
“This could, therefore, potentially be a very powerful tool for giving a holistic understanding of public health of different communities.”
Professor Davey Jones, who led a team at Bangor University analysing the wastewater for viruses, said: “Norovirus and seasonal flu have always been a huge problem in hospitals each winter; now Covid-19 has added to this problem.
“Our proof-of-concept study has shown the potential for Wastewater Based Epidemiology to provide an early warning surveillance system for these and other diseases, which would enable hospitals to prepare for outbreaks in the local area.”
Matthew Wade, from the UK Health Security Agency, said: “This has been a fantastic collaboration of chemists, biologists and Government agencies, working with multiple water companies to collect important data on both chemical and biological markers from different parts of the UK.
“We are delighted to be part of this project and look forward to developing the potential of this public health tool even further in the future.”
The study is published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials, and was funded by the UK Health Security Agency and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
Engineers at the University of British Columbia have developed a new water treatment that removes “forever chemicals” from drinking water safely, efficiently — and for good.
Forever chemicals, formally known as PFAS (per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are a large group of substances that make certain products non-stick or stain-resistant. There are more than 4,700 PFAS in use, mostly in raingear, non-stick cookware, stain repellents and firefighting foam. Research links these chemicals to a wide range of health problems including hormonal disruption, cardiovascular disease, developmental delays and cancer.
To remove PFAS from drinking water, Dr. Mohseni and his team devised a unique adsorbing material that is capable of trapping and holding all the PFAS present in the water supply.
The PFAS are then destroyed using special electrochemical and photochemical techniques, also developed at the Mohseni lab and described in part in a new paper published recently in Chemosphere.
While there are treatments currently on the market, like activated carbon and ion-exchange systems which are widely used in homes and industry, they do not effectively capture all the different PFAS, or they require longer treatment time, Dr. Mohseni explained.
“Our adsorbing media captures up to 99 per cent of PFAS particles and can also be regenerated and potentially reused. This means that when we scrub off the PFAS from these materials, we do not end up with more highly toxic solid waste that will be another major environmental challenge.”
He explained that while PFAS are no longer manufactured in Canada, they are still incorporated in many consumer products and can then leach into the environment. For example, when we apply stain-resistant or repellent sprays/materials, wash PFAS-treated raingear, or use certain foams to put down fires, the chemicals end up in our waterways. Or when we use PFAS-containing cosmetics and sunscreens, the chemicals could find their way into the body.
For most people, exposure is through food and consumer products, but they can also be exposed from drinking water — particularly if they live in areas with contaminated water sources.
Dr. Mohseni, whose research group also focuses on developing water solutions for rural, remote and Indigenous communities, noted: “Our adsorbing media are particularly beneficial for people living in smaller communities who lack resources to implement the most advanced and expensive solutions that could capture PFAS. These can also be used in the form of decentralized and in-home water treatments.”
The UBC team is preparing to pilot the new technology at a number of locations in B.C. starting this month.
“The results we obtain from these real-world field studies will allow us to further optimize the technology and have it ready as products that municipalities, industry and individuals can use to eliminate PFAS in their water,” said Dr. Mohseni.
The first study into the biological response of the upper ocean in the wake of South Pacific cyclones could help predict the impact of warming ocean temperatures, New Zealand researchers believe.
Dr Pete Russell, of the University of Otago’s Department of Marine Science, and Dr Christopher Horvat, of the University of Auckland’s Department of Physics, have published a study on the oceanic biological effect of Cyclone Oma which passed near Vanuatu in 2019.
“While Oma was a relatively benign cyclone, it produced a massive phytoplankton bloom in its wake — the single most abnormal event in the history of South Pacific chlorophyll measurements,” Dr Russell says.
“Such an extreme event can produce a large amount of biomass in a part of the ocean that is typically a biological desert. We don’t yet know about the fate of this biomass, but one possibility is that it could end up on the bottom of the ocean, sequestering carbon.”
The study, just published in Geophysical Research Letters, found the phytoplankton bloom produced by Oma was exceedingly rare, occurring just once every 1500 years in the same location.
“Cyclones are one of the mechanisms that dissipate heat from the tropics. Warming oceans mean more heat to dissipate. This means more intense storms and perhaps longer storm seasons resulting in more storms.
“By examining sediment cores from the last inter-glacial period, we may get a heads up on what cyclone activity to expect with ocean temperatures 1+ degrees higher than today,” Dr Russell says.
The pair found if a storm hovers above a patch of ocean long enough, physical interactions between the cyclone winds and ocean will cause water to rise near its eye, bringing nutrient rich water to the surface which seeds a phytoplankton bloom.
Dr Horvat says these events may be biological hotspots, causing large amounts of biological material to be produced in areas typically devoid of upper-ocean life.
“These cyclones can do amazing things — other than have strong winds, they can also dramatically affect the plants and animals living in the upper ocean and change the cycling of carbon by leading to blooms.
“Along with these bloom events in the open ocean, cyclone activity results in both coastal upwelling and runoff from the land that also deliver nutrients into the photic zone, generating blooms. These blooms could be an integral part of the local marine ecosystems of our Pacific neighbours supporting higher food chains,” he says.
The researchers say they know too little about phytoplankton blooms to declare them as being good or bad, but they believe there is potential for them to support open ocean ecosystems that are nutrient limited.
“We hope to investigate this further, in particular the influence on fisheries for Pacific islands,” Dr Horvat says.
*The researchers note recent cyclones in the South Pacific were unique to Oma.
Cyclone Gabrielle moved too fast to produce a bloom due to its circular motion, however it did, through interactions with reefs in the coral sea, lead to a bloom there.
Cyclones Judy and Kevin again did not hover long enough in the same region to produce a phytoplankton bloom due to circular motion, but because both passed over larger islands there was evidence of a bloom due to run-off of nutrients from the land.
