The Stream, February 13, 2025: Green Ring Around Burkina Faso’s Capital; Environmental Losses in Gaza Are Devastating

Photo caption: Children collecting water in December 2023, in Khan Younis city, south of the Gaza Strip. Photo © UNICEF/UNI485724/El Baba

YOUR GLOBAL RUNDOWN

• Growers in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, are combating extreme heat and food insecurity by maintaining a greenbelt around the capital.
• Torrential rains fell on Sydney, Australia, earlier this week, as more than 20 people were rescued from their vehicles. 
• Dominica, China, and Honduras have suffered the greatest economic losses due to extreme weather events since 1993, according to a new report.
• Following a fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, experts and civilians are beginning to analyze the environmental toll of the attacks on Gaza.

— Christian Thorsberg, Interim Stream Editor

Fresh: From the Great Lakes Region

Invasive Carp Project Stalls: A $1.15 billion project to install a barrier in Illinois’ Des Plaines River, intended to prevent invasive carp from reaching the Great Lakes, has been postponed due to the anticipated lack of federal funding, Wisconsin Public Media reports.

Minnesota’s Data Centers: Policymakers in Minnesota — where several large-scale data centers are currently being built to meet the computing needs of artificial intelligence services — are expressing concern for the future of the state’s groundwater should data center construction continue at its current pace, Minnesota Public Radio reports. 

Bridge Michigan, Circle of Blue, Great Lakes Now at Detroit Public Television, Michigan Public and The Narwhal work together to report on the most pressing threats to the Great Lakes region’s water. This independent journalism is supported by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. Find all the work here.

• Tackling environmental racism in Chemical Valley — The Narwhal
• Snow is making a big comeback in Michigan this year, with more to come — Bridge Michigan
• New York’s proposed PFAS legislation and other Great Lakes states latest efforts to combat ‘forever chemicals’ — Great Lakes Now
• Gone a century, Arctic grayling return soon to Michigan. Can they survive? — Michigan Public

The Lead

In Burkina Faso, growers are cultivating a “greenbelt” of vegetable plots to combat food insecurity caused by a changing climate and growing population.

Ouagadougou, the capital, has doubled its population to more than three million people in the last 14 years, The Guardian reports. This increase, combined with the lasting effects of intense drought in the 1980s, extreme heat over the past year, and continued degradation of productive farmland, has endangered food systems. More than nine million hectares of productive land, about one-third of the country, is degraded, “with an estimated average degradation rate of 360,000 hectares per year.” But the desert, which for years has moved closer and closer to Ouagadougou, is now shielded by a green ring of reforested trees and vegetable plots, which are maintained by city residents. Each person can have a plot of six beds, with many growing “cabbage, onion, mint, lettuce and papaya” as a way to boost their income. “We water, rest, water – that’s our day,” one grower told The Guardian. 

Financed in part by the Burkinabé Red Cross, “including the construction of two water wells and training in agroecology,” the greenbelt has also proven effective in helping to lower city temperatures. A recent NASA study analyzing the impact of greenbelts in 500 cities around the world found that they carry a cooling capacity of between 2.5 and 3.6 degrees Celsius.

Recent WaterNews from Circle of Blue

• Have You Seen This Fish Thief? — A new film spotlights the sea lamprey, also known as “Dracula of the Lakes.”
• PERSPECTIVE | Freshwater Crises Rise on World Economic Forum Agenda — Program highlights high costs of inaction.

This Week’s Top Water Stories, Told In Numbers

4

Inches of rain that fell on Sydney on Sunday, shutting down Australia’s largest city and prompting life-saving rescues of roughly 21 people who were trapped in their cars, Sydney Morning Herald reports. The downtown Fish Market, public transportation systems, and other roads were inundated with flood water, with circulating videos showing vehicles struggling to slog through streets which resemble canals and bikers pedals-deep in water. Many internet customers were left without access for several hours amidst the storm.

800,000

The number of people estimated to have been killed globally over the past 30 years due to extreme weather events including floods, storms, drought, heat waves, and wildfire, according to the NGO Germanwatch. Deutsche Welle reports that this year’s Climate Risk Index, which analyzes data collected from 1993 to 2022, estimated that the cumulative economic damage from these disasters totaled almost $4.2 trillion. Dominica, China, and Honduras suffered the greatest financial losses, stemming in large part from the destruction of crops and infrastructure.

On the Radar

As people return to Gaza following a fragile ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, the environmental devastation across their home is plain: satellite images reveal the extent to which sanitation networks, the Wadi Gaza river, wetlands, underground water reserves, and more than two-thirds of Gaza’s farmland have been destroyed, Yale Environment 360 reports. Up to 3.5 million cubic feet of raw sewage and wastewater spill across land into the Mediterranean each day; 90 percent of tree-cover in northern Gaza has disappeared, and the loss of healthy topsoil to bombings and other violence leaves great swaths of land vulnerable to desertification. Saeed Bagheri, a lecturer in international law at the University of Reading, tells Yale Environment 360 that nature is the “silent victim of Israel’s war on Gaza.”

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.