The Stream, October 16, 2024: Just One-Third of Europe’s Surface Waters Are in Good Health, New Report Shows

The Rhine River, in Switzerland. Photo © J. Carl Ganter/Circle of Blue

YOUR GLOBAL RUNDOWN 

• More than 1,000 people on the fringes of the Sahara Desert, one of the earth’s driest places, have been killed in recent months following surreal flooding events.
• In Malawi, one maker’s DIY water pumps are helping farmers irrigate more effectively.
• High global ocean temperatures are diminishing the odds of a significant — or at least timely — La Niña weather pattern across the U.S. this winter.
• According to a new report, roughly one-third of Europe’s surface waters are in good health or better, falling well short of now-outdated European Union targets.

A new investigation sheds light on a U.S.-government funded effort to “downplay pesticide dangers” and defame the chemicals’ critics.

— Christian Thorsberg, Interim Stream Editor

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The Lead

Earlier this century, European Union leaders set a deadline of 2015 for a continental goal: all Europe’s rivers, lakes, streams, and groundwaters would be in good health. 

But six years beyond that target, in 2021, just 37 percent of Europe’s surface waters have achieved a “good or high ecological status,” with only 29 percent attaining “good chemical status.” As a result, the EU’s Water Framework Directive is resetting the target date for all-around clean waters to 2027. Leaders hope that new policy directives on sustainable development, pollution limits, drought and flooding action plans, and soil strategies will make this delayed effort a success, the second time around.

Past shortcomings and future goals were shared this week in a new report from the European Environment Agency. 

To one end, according to the report, the amount of toxics being fed directly into freshwater ecosystems has not been significantly addressed. Coal-fired power plants and farms continue to have some of the most detrimental effects on the health of the continent’s water bodies, contributing pollutants both through the air and agricultural runoff. More than half of surface waters face pressures from diffuse atmospheric pollution (52 percent of surface waters) and changes to natural flow or physical features (51 percent). If not for the release of long-lived chemicals, such as mercury or bromine, into waterways, “80 percent of surface waters would achieve good chemical status rather than 29 percent.”

Water quantity and availability is high — 91 percent of groundwater is in good quantitative status — though water stress continues to affect large areas: 20 percent of European territory and 30 percent of its population. Worse, 89 percent of “protected wetland habitats have poor or bad conservation status and are still suffering from multiple pressures such as land drainage, habitat conversion and agricultural intensification.”

Powerful flooding and droughts continue to afflict member nations and emphasize the resource’s scarcity in non-normal climate patterns.

“Having a healthy aquatic ecosystem helps mitigate the impacts we’re seeing of climate change,” Trine Christiansen, a co-author of the report, told The Guardian. “The better the [water] situation we have, the more capable we are of handling these more extreme events.” 

Across most regions of Germany, Spain, Italy, Poland, Croatia, Sweden, and the Baltic nations, at least half of all water bodies failed to achieve good ecological status.

This Week’s Top Water Stories, Told In Numbers

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Inches of rain that fell in some parts of the Sahara Desert last week, causing flooding in the world’s largest hot desert for the first time in at least 30 years, CNN reports. Southeast Morocco was hit particularly hard, with towns and villages witnessing lakes taking shape amidst tall sand dunes. On the southern edge of the Sahara, heavy recent rainfall has also taken its toll. Dams have failed in northern Nigeria, communities have been decimated with damages in Niger, and every single one of Chad’s 23 provinces have experienced flooding. According to the United Nations, these rains have killed more than 1,460 people “on the fringes of the Sahara” over the past few months, Reuters reports.

60 percent

The odds that a La Niña weather pattern will develop this fall in the United States, a downgrade from the 70 percent chance forecasted this summer, Yale Environment 360 reports. The system, a result of cooler Pacific Ocean temperatures, usually means wetter, colder winters in higher U.S. latitudes. But this year, following continued global trends, ocean temperatures remain higher than historic averages. And in Australia, experts are predicting high water temperatures to keep a potential La Niña pattern at bay until at least next February.

On the Radar

In Malawi, where funding for water infrastructure is relatively scarce, an enterprising engineer named Zack Caleb Mwale is using discarded materials from computers and other electronic waste to build irrigation pumps for local farmers, DW reports.

Christian Thorsberg

Christian Thorsberg is an environmental writer from Chicago. He is passionate about climate and cultural phenomena that often appear slow or invisible, and he examines these themes in his journalism, poetry, and fiction.