As Iran faces one of its worst droughts in decades, President Masoud Pezeshkian has revived a long-debated plan to move the capital city Tehran. But the country needs to address first the root causes of its water bankruptcy.
Tag: water
Families in Ciudad Nueva unknowingly drank arsenic-laced water. Now, they live with the scars — and they’re losing faith in the government’s ability to solve the problem.
Very few people actually need two liters of water a day. But how much do they really need? What changes in the heat, whether coffee counts – and why many amateur athletes drink dangerously large amounts.
In Botswana’s Okavango Delta — declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2014 — warming trends over the past two decades are approximately twice the global average.
The Vilcabamba, the Atrato or the Whanganui have achieved recognition as living entities with rights. More and more rivers are achieving this type of legal protection (and respect). In Spain, the Tins was the first river to have its rights recognized.
Shortages of water, which have ultimately long been controlled by Israel, have long been a brutal reality for the Palestinians of Gaza. Now with the ongoing bombing and siege campaign, the daily search for water has become central to the struggle to survive.
An ongoing outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease in southeastern Poland, near the Ukraine border, has prompted interventions from the Polish internal security agency. Over the past four days, authorities have not found any signs of deliberate spread of the disease, but are continuing to investigate.
India’s “untouchables” still face violence and discrimination for drinking or using water they are not supposed to. For the author, a Dalit himself, it’s time for Indian environmentalists and researchers who are striving to provide equal water access to acknowledge the role caste is playing.
Iran and Afghanistan have long had a tense relationship. Recent skirmishes at their shared border indicate that conflict is escalating, but the causes are unclear.
Election day is approaching in Turkey. Unemployment, runaway inflation and eroding rule of law are top of mind for many. But one subject isn’t getting the attention it deserves: the environment.
There are too many animals for the available water supply in the Gobi desert region. The situation worsens each year.
Giving nature rights, as South American nations are keen to do these days, is well-intentioned, but far too limited in scope to make sense.
As the world moves to renewable energy, demand for lithium has surged. But the race to extract the precious mineral comes with hidden costs for local communities and the environment. So just how green is the energy transition after all?
In the northern Italian region of Veneto, drought has forced half the municipalities to ration water resources. In contrast, the region’s Coca-Cola plant has upped production, using even more water that it gets for a cheap price.
Fishing nets, industry and other human-caused dumping are poisoning Russia’s Lake Baikal, the world’s largest, deepest (and oldest) lake. Bigger than all the North American Great Lakes combined, it’s at risk after 25 million years of life.
With water rationing, soaring food prices and an economic crisis brought on by COVID-19, Algerians begin the month of fasting in difficult conditions.
For rural communities in particular, serious water shortages were a big problem even before the COVID-19 outbreak made handwashing all the more imperative.
Access to safe water is a universal right. Yet, it is far from being a reality. As part of the United Nations’ World Water Day on March 22, UNICEF France created with the French Swimming Federation “La Nuit de l’Eau” (Water Night): 230 swimming pools nationwide are holding water sports events and other fun activities Saturday in an effort to raise awareness (and funds) for water access programs in Haiti. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/embed/V_7J6vD45O8 expand=1] UNICEF France’s 2019 Nuit de l’Eau for children in Haiti — ©Marco Dormino/UNICEF/OneShot OneShot is a new digital format to tell the story of a single photograph […]
Scientists from the University of Magdalena in Colombia discovered six new species of tardigrades, microscopic ‘water bears’ that are remarkably resistant to extreme conditions and may help medical researchers.
The Santa Cruz River, once the city’s lifeblood, has been bone-dry for the past 70 years. But if all goes according to plan, the ancient waterway could be back in action by as early as next year.
-Analysis- Good news for the people of Cape Town: “Day Zero,” when South Africa’s second most-populated city is expected to run out of water has been pushed back. But it’s only a very temporary reprieve. The city is now expected to go waterless — and confront all the chaos that it implies — on July […]
A Bogotá family invented a system to drain rainwater from any rooftop and store it in an ‘Ekowall’ of plastic bottles.
The Antarctic, one of the last, unspoiled parts of the natural world, will, like the Amazon, face man’s destructive onslaught unless states take action quickly.
MEXICO CITY — The capital of Mexico delivers water unequally to its 20 million people. While residents of neighborhoods like Cuauhtémoc or Polanco suffer occasional water shortages — everyone does — poorer areas face routine shortages, reports Mexican newspaper La Jornada. One such place is Iztapalapa, where there can be no water for weeks, and […]
Droughts, demographics, industrialization, pollution, climate change … The need for more clean and accessible water is growing urgent in many places around the world. But beyond praying to the rain gods, what real-life responses are out there? Innovation is key both to help preserve clean water sources, as well as finding new ways to purify […]
MARINDUQUE — Elisa Hernandez dips her yellow blouse into the Boac River’s rushing water and then slaps it up against the shoreline’s gray stones. The 73-year-old used to earn a living washing her whole community’s laundry this way. “We felt at home in this river … It was so clean, we played in it and we used to catch a lot of fish here too,” she says. But that all changed in March 1996, when a drainage pipe inside a copper mine burst about 20 kilometers upstream. Millions of tons of toxic mine waste, including lead and arsenic, flooded into […]
Global warming, population booms, rising urbanization, industrialization — an explosive mixture that may make water supplies the world’s new spark for armed conflict.
This is the second installment of a three-part series “Couchsurfing (And Keeping Secrets) In Palestine.” Read Part 1 here. -Essay- We wake up at 9 a.m. “I need to go to work,” Ehab tells us, implying that Samuel (the American who was sharing the room with us) and I also need to go. Quickly, we […]
OCUMARE — It’s midday on this Thursday, and hundreds of people are squeezing inside a supermarket in Ocumare, a poor city about an hour’s drive south of Caracas. Armed police officers are allowing people in, but just a few at a time, infuriating the multitude massed outside since dawn to buy corn flour at a […]
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Sea Shore — Video Quote Of The Day
PARIS — A report says the use of an anti-mosquito pesticide in drinking water could be the cause of the mass outbreak of microcephaly cases in newborns Latin America, and not the Zika virus, as the Brazilian government and the World Health Organization (WHO) have been saying. French weekly magazine Paris Match cites a report […]
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Desert Relentlessly Advances In Iran
TEHRAN — Iran is increasingly “becoming a desert” thanks to decades of wasted water supplies and a dry climate exacerbated by climate change, Tehran daily Arman-e Emruz reported Thursday. Water resource specialist Mohammadreza Fatemi told the newspaper that the state environmental agency has mismanged water resources for at least 20 years, destroying the environment in […]
CARUARU — For months now, water taps in some of northeastern Brazil’s cities have been running dry. Not during certain hours of the day. Or certain days of the week. But all the time. Morning and night. Day after day, with the exception of just two days per month. And it’s not just residents being […]
Bad urban planning, pollution, corruption, the Indian megapolis offers lessons on exactly how not to run your city.
FORT MACKAY — Figuring out which way the winds are blowing is a piece of cake in the hamlet of Fort MacKay, Canada. Just follow the direction of the fumes. On this cold February morning, with temperatures below -20 °C (-4 ºF) in the northern part of Alberta, the columns rising from the chimneys of […]
For years Beijing has said it’s working to provide safe drinking water to people in the countryside, but experts say the goal is far from being realized.
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Yes, Mermaiding Is A Thing
Splashed ever more across popular culture, mermaids are now something very real for enchanted girls and women who can don tails and dive in. Some are better at it than others.
VIGEVANO — For one traffic warden in this northern Italian city, “a structure with a circular base, 30 centimeters in diameter and 30 centimeters in height, with an attached tray containing water” was illegally occupying public land. For the bar owner who put it there, it was just a doggy water bowl left as courtesy […]
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Feeding Time At The Zoo: Ice Cream Edition
It’s hot in Colombia, and severe drought conditions are affecting most of the country. Though forest fires have sadly killed thousands of wild animals, those at the zoo in the southern city of Cali are getting some pampering and a little help cooling off. Staff there have decided to mix the animals’ food with ice, […]