Freshwater’s life-giving benefits are being gravely threatened by humanity’s manipulations of the hydrological cycle, impacting the climate and biodiversity, and undermining Earth’s operating system.
PASURUAN, Indonesia — Farming and other water-based industries thrive in Pasuruan, a fertile rice-growing district in Indonesia’s East Java province that’s home to active volcanoes and rich aquifers. Thanks to…
Dams fragment rivers, endanger aquatic species, emit large amounts of carbon and methane, cause deforestation, and hurt traditional communities, but we still need their benefits. Scientific management may be the answer.
“It still rains here,” says Emeterio Hernández Cano, the San Francisco communal land commissioner, at the start of a tour of La Fabriquita, a pine and oak forest of just…
Caffeine isn’t only the most consumed psychostimulant in the world, it’s also one of the most ubiquitous of pollutants in the world’s rivers, says a new global study of pharmaceutical waste. It’s also impacting marine ecosystems, says another new study.
7.8 billion people produce a lot of waste, but governments, entrepreneurs and NGOs are developing a host of technologies that work with nature to transform a dirty problem into a suite of elegant sustainable solutions.
KATHMANDU — Stuffed garbage bags float gently down the Bisnumati River in the western part of Kathmandu. The river, sacred to Nepal’s Hindu and Buddhist populations, is one of the…
It doesn’t get talked about much, but 7.8 billion humans make a lot of waste, and a lot of it is flowing into the planet’s rivers, estuaries and oceans, with major impacts on clean water, biodiversity and public health.
Activists have accused British-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto of contaminating water sources around its ilmenite mine in Madagascar. At some sites, uranium and lead levels have been recorded at 52…
Water-sensitive urban design (WSUD), a holistic sustainable approach to water management, could give the world’s cities a viable means of dealing with the climatic shocks ahead. Cape Town and Singapore point the way.
Indigenous people living near the Teles Pires and São Manoel dams in the Brazilian Amazon say the projects have polluted their river, causing health problems and wrecking the fishery. COVID-19 made things worse.
From Tripoli to Phoenix, the world’s thirst in great desert cities is deepening, even as agribusiness guzzles more water to feed them. Humanity’s arid urban places are colliding with a key Planetary Boundary, scientists warn.
KUPANG, Indonesia — In Indonesia’s arid, southern East Nusa Tenggara province, clean water is hard to come by. The issue made national headlines last year when an “extreme drought” triggered…
Manual Pintado spent the past 15 years raising cattle in El Pangui, a municipality nestled in south-eastern Ecuador´s Amazonian region. Now, he receives an income for leaving his 15 hectares…
Groundwater cached below the Earth's surface is one of the world's most precious resources. Nearly half of the human population depends on these reserves for our daily needs and for…
Mileva "Gara" Jovanović's family has been taking cattle up to graze in Montenegro’s Sinjajevina Highlands for more than 140 summers. The mountain pastures of the Sinjajevina-Durmitor Massif are the largest…
Spurred by a deadly Brazilian dam disaster in early 2019, a partnership between the U.N. and industry leaders has released new guidance on managing mining waste. Released Aug. 5, the…
The Brazilian riverine communities of Boa Nova and Saracá say they’ve endured decades of environmental harm brought by MRN, the world’s fourth largest bauxite mining company.
In a corner of Brazil’s Mato Grosso state, a handful of clandestine roads neatly slice the dense jungle canopy into rectangles. From the sky, an entourage of bulldozers can be…
Pixaim is one of the remaining quilombos on the Atlantic coast, an Afro-Brazilian settlement already gravely impacted by upstream dams. Now climate change could doom it.
Activists have accused mining giant Rio Tinto of dragging its feet in addressing the fallout from a breach that occurred at its mine in Madagascar five years ago and that…
The world is in a slow-moving, persistent water crisis. Rapidly rising water usage, increasingly uncertain rainfall, and widespread water pollution push more of our world into water stress and intensify…
KUALA KOH, Malaysia — On a daytime flight into Kuala Lumpur airport, it’s hard not to feel a certain sense of despair. The land, at times adorned by jungle-clad mountains,…
Deforestation can reduce communities’ access to clean drinking water, according to a recent study conducted in Malawi. A lot of prior research on how deforestation impacts water dynamics has shown…
With India just a few weeks away from the general elections, a new survey has shed light on what the country's voters want. The survey, released by the NGO Association…
There’s another world beneath the soil of Central Texas, one that is dark, wet, and mysterious. It’s an isolated kingdom ruled by a unique group of underground salamanders. Now, new…
LA GUAJIRA, Colombia — “It was beautiful here,” said Mariella. “There were crops, flowers, animals. There was life.” Mariella is an indigenous Wayuu from the community of Wasimo in the dusty desert…
Millions of people living in the lower reaches of the Ganges basin in India may face food shortages in the next three decades if the iconic river continues to lose…
A spate of mass toxic poisonings in the Cambodian provinces of Kratie and Mondulkiri have hospitalized hundreds and killed at least 16 people since May. Although the causes of the…
KUCHING, Malaysia — As governments in Southeast Asia target economic growth through infrastructure development, China, the world’s second-largest economy, has emerged as a ready funder for some of the most…
