Just a little more than one-third of Europe’s surface water is in “good” health or better, a new report from the European Environment Agency (EEA) has found. The report also said the majority of protected aquatic species and habitats have either a “poor” or “bad” conservation status.

The data was collected from 19 EU member countries. 

According to the report, only about 37% of the surface water analyzed in 2021 was identified as having “good” quality or better, and only 29% had at least a good chemical status. 

A major contributing factor to poor chemical status was long-lived pollutants, like mercury or “brominated flame retardants.” If these were not a factor, the study says, 80% of the surface water would be in good health or better.

Another major factor is ongoing atmospheric pollution, largely coming from coal plants and diffuse pollution from agriculture.

Groundwater, on the other hand, which supports local ecosystems and supplies two-thirds of the continent’s drinking water, was reported to be much healthier, although still not in perfect health. About 77% of groundwater studied was in good chemical status and 91% was in “good quantitative status.”

According to the study authors, “Failure to achieve good ecological status shows that European aquatic ecosystems are still seriously degraded.”

Only 17% of protected lake, river, alluvial and riparian habitats were shown to be in good health, while 89% of wetlands were shown to be in bad health or worse. A majority of protected fish and amphibian species were shown to be in poor or bad ecological health and are threatened with becoming locally extinct. “This shows that the EU is far from achieving its biodiversity ambition in aquatic ecosystems,” the authors wrote.

The study uses the 2022 catastrophic die-off event in the Oder River in Germany and Poland as an example of the consequences of bodies of water being in poor or bad health. More than 100 metric tonnes (148 U.S. tons) of dead fish were removed from the river after an algal bloom of the harmful species Prymnesium parvum released deadly toxins in the water.

The algal bloom was largely caused by a combination of salt pollution from salt mines and nutrient pollution — including nitrogen and phosphorous — from urban wastewater, the study said.

The “most significant” pressure, according to the report, was from agriculture, especially from the use of “nutrients and pesticides” for crops.

Agriculture as a practice also consumes an immense amount of water and is the single practice that uses the most water in all of Europe by far. The report warns that, without any significant changes, agricultural demand is set to increase in the coming years.

“The health of Europe’s waters is not good,” Leena Ylä-Mononen, EEA’s executive director, said in a press release. “Our waters face an unprecedented set of challenges that threatens Europe’s water security. We need to redouble our efforts to restore the health of our valued rivers, lakes, coastal waters, and other water bodies and to make sure this vital resource is resilient and secure for generations to come.”

The press release outlines how the health of these waters can improve, including reducing water use, increasing water use efficiency, setting effective targets and improving water management.

Europe should also take on pressures affecting the waters, including preventing pollution, as well as improving nature restoration. In addition to improving water quality, doing so would help fight the climate crisis, Trine Christiansen, one of the study authors, told The Guardian.

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

The post Only 37% of Europe’s Surface Water Is Healthy, Study Finds appeared first on EcoWatch.

Rising sea levels threaten to completely submerge Tuvalu in the coming decades. Facing an unprecedented crisis, officials are not only trying to preserve a shrinking country but attempting to ensure the nation, as well as its culture and traditions, will still exist, even if its land doesn’t.

By 2050. It’s estimated that about half of the country will be underwater. By 2100, that number would be 95%. Tuvalu is extremely susceptible to rising seas due to its small size and low elevation, which is just about two meters above sea level on average.

Pasuna Tuaga, Tuvalu’s permanent secretary for foreign affairs told Reuters, “Tuvalu wishes to champion sea level rise to be treated as a standalone agenda, not crowded under the climate change discourse,” adding, “It is an existential threat to Tuvalu’s statehood and survival of its identity.”

Although it has just 10 square miles of land mass, Tuvalu also controls about 290,000 square miles of the Pacific. It’s through this patch of ocean — Tuvalu’s maritime boundaries — that officials are trying to maintain the country’s existence, even if the sea submerges each of its nine islands. In that case, Tuvalu would keep control of its maritime boundaries and lucrative fishing rights, regardless of the state of its land.

Officials see two potential paths to preserve ownership of its maritime boundaries: through the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea or a resolution from the United Nations, Reuters reported.

Last Wednesday, Tuvalu came closer to the latter, when Feleti Teo, prime minister of Tuvalu, formally requested support for the country’s campaign to permanently recognize its maritime boundaries at the UN’s General Assembly.

“A rising ocean brings higher tides, and with increasing storm intensity, our villages and fields are devastated throughout the year,” he said. “Infrastructure such as homes, roads and power lines are washed away. Higher land on which to rebuild does not exist. Our peoples will be unable to exist on the islands and shores they have called home for generations.”

Teo also said climate change threatens the culture and very way of life for Tuvaluans and other island nations. “The existential threat we face is not of our making. But it will remake us,” he said. 

Teo said he wants to help shape an “ambitious” UN declaration for 2026.

He proposed six goals for the declaration, including ensuring upholding the principle of statehood continuity, which ensures a country’s statehood, even if it undergoes government or territory changes; reaffirming Tuvalu’s maritime zones; a pathway for safe, orderly climate migration; programs to safeguard Tuvaluan culture and heritage; improved financing mechanisms for vulnerable countries; and lastly, to establish a “dedicated platform to share best practices, innovative solutions and necessary data and analysis to support informed risk disaster management decisions in affected countries.”

Tuvaluans are weighing an important question: whether to stay in their home country amid rising sea levels, or to move to a safer country. Maani Maani, 32, an IT worker and resident of Fongafale told Reuters, “Some will have to go and some will want to stay here.”

“It’s a very hard decision to make,” he added. “To leave a country, you leave the culture you were born with, and culture is everything – family, your sister, your brother. It is everything.”

“It’s a very difficult conversation, very emotional,” Grace Malie, a young mother and Tuvalu resident, said in an interview according to the Associated Press. “And it’s 50-50. Some of us wish to stay. Some of them, because they have families,” will probably head to Australia.

In response to the looming threat of the country’s destruction from climate change, Tuvalu signed the Falepili Union treaty with Australia in 2023, which addresses Tuvalu’s need for support amid rising sea levels. The treaty sees that Australia provides $11 million for coastal restoration projects. It also allows for 280 Tuvaluans to emigrate to Australia annually to escape the worst effects of the climate crisis, starting next year. 

However, Teo says there is more work to be done. 

“As a coalition for higher ambition, we will continue to work with all of you to advance stronger advocacy, to raise global awareness, and to ensure higher commitments in support for the affected countries and communities,” he said, adding, “The international community needs to act now; we cannot afford to wait any longer.”

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Brazil is facing its worst drought on record, fueled by widespread deforestation and wildfire destruction in the Amazon and surrounding regions, scientists say.

The destruction hinders the area’s natural water cycle, especially its crucial “flying river” phenomenon. As the trees in the Eastern Amazon and Cerrado regions absorb rainfall brought about by moisture coming from the Atlantic, they later release water vapor into the air through transpiration, which then brings rainfall to much of Brazil and other parts of South America. 

But the trees the process requires are being destroyed, leading to rivers drying up and areas that were once green now resembling deserts.

Luciana Gatti, a climate researcher at Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, told The Washington Post, “This is a process connected from the bottom to the top, with the flying rivers at the top being weakened, and the earth being weakened at the bottom, erasing natural fountains and reducing river levels.”

Nearly 40% of the Amazon’s most vital areas are unprotected, Reuters reported Wednesday. That includes a large part of the Amazon’s northeast, nestled against the Atlantic Ocean, which holds an immense amount of carbon compared to the rest of the region. 

As the Amazon’s northeast is being destroyed, not only is it disrupting the water cycle and leading to further droughts elsewhere, but it’s also releasing an enormous amount of carbon into the atmosphere.

“This is the first time that a drought has covered all the way from the North to the country’s Southeast,” Ana Paula Cunha, a researcher at CEMADEN, Brazil’s National Center for Monitoring and Early Warning of Natural Disasters, said in a statement last week. “It is the most intense and widespread drought in history.”

Amid the destruction, Brazil’s President Lula da Silva recently flew into the Amazon. “It seems to me that things are getting worse, year after year after year,” he said. 

“In the Pantanal we’ve had the worst drought in the last 73 years… This is a problem that we have to fix because otherwise humanity is going to destroy our planet,” Lula added. “We cannot destroy that which we rely on for our life.”

^{Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on a flight over the Pantanal on July 31, 2024. Ricardo Stuckert / Lula Oficial}

The Cerrado region in the country’s southeast, which is also a crucial part of the water cycle, is in the midst of its worst drought in at least 700 years, a new study shows.

The team examined geological data to “extend the perception of drought caused by global warming to a period long before the weather station’s records began,” Francisco William da Cruz Junior, a professor at the University of São Paulo’s Institute of Geosciences and one of the study’s authors, told the São Paulo Research Foundation.

“This proved that the Cerrado is drier than it was and that the dry weather is associated with the disruption to the hydrological cycle caused by the rise in temperature due to human activity, especially greenhouse gas emissions,” he said.

More than 59% of the country is under stress from drought. In São Paolo, Brazil’s most populated city with more than 21 million residents, wildfires have reduced air quality to the second lowest in the world, The Associated Press reported. Meanwhile, the city’s Pinheiros River turned green from pollution and drought. 

“You can put this in capital letters,” Gatti said. “It will get worse and worse. We are heading toward an apocalyptical situation, and unfortunately, we only wake up at the last minute.”

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California is in the midst of a scorching late-summer heat wave that threatens to worsen wildfire conditions, while several wildfires have broken out this week, prompting multiple evacuation efforts across the state.

The National Weather Service (NWS) said in a statement Thursday that there will be “Nothing but heat for the next three days,” and warned that many areas will see even hotter temperatures on Friday.

“The hot temperatures lived up to their billing today and then some as light offshore flow in the morning combined with extremely hot temperatures aloft to roast most of southern California in triple-digit heat,” the NWS said in an update on Thursday at 2:12 p.m. PST. “Only the immediate coastal areas were spared the extreme heat, though even there, temperatures were 5-10 degrees above normal.”

Most Californians are under some level of heat advisory, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. 

Temperatures are expected to peak for most of the state on Friday, with many areas breaching 100°F. Some areas, like Coachella Valley, have already reached temperatures close to 120°F, on par with Death Valley — one of the hottest places on Earth. 

David Eisenman, professor of medicine and public health at UCLA and co-director of the Center for Healthy Climate Solutions, told the Los Angeles Times that with such extreme temperatures, it’s important to stay cool, drink water or visit a cool place, like a cooling center or library.

“We know that extreme heat causes more deaths than any other natural disaster,” he said. “The problem is we don’t look at [heat events] in the same sort of frightened way. We’ve also been slow as a nation to take extreme heat seriously as a disaster,” 

The NWS said in an update Friday morning that “Dangerously hot conditions are possible away from the coast, especially in the mountain and foothill locations where overnight low temperatures will cool little from daytime highs.”

As for the state’s raging wildfires, Cal Fire on Thursday reported the state’s ninth wildfire emergency incident in three days, the most devastating of which being the Boone Fire, which broke out on Tuesday and has burned more than 16,000 acres. It is only 5% contained as of Friday. The cause of the fires is still undetermined.

In Los Angeles, the city has set up at least five cooling centers this week amid the hottest temperatures the city has seen since 2020. Los Angeles and large parts of southern California are under “extreme” heat risk, according to the NWS.

UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain told The Associated Press that there’s an “extreme contrast” between people who live close to the sea versus people living farther from the coast. “It’s these inland areas where we see people who… are killed by this extreme heat or whose lives are at least made miserable.”

Swain also hinted toward an aspect of climate injustice in regard to the rise in extreme temperatures. California is “becoming more expensive, more exclusive in the places that are least likely to experience extreme heat,” he said. “The people who are most at risk of extreme heat” — those with limited financial resources — “are precisely the people experiencing extreme heat.”

The NWS said that weather models point to slight cooling onshore winds on Saturday, but added that “all this will likely do is lower temps from ridiculously hot to extremely hot, or roughly 1-4 degrees of cooling.” Through the weekend, daytime temperatures are expected to remain about 10-15 degrees above normal, with the nights to be “extremely warm.”

“Hot conditions will linger into early next week, then a cooling trend will develop as an upper-level trough will dig into the Pacific Northwest,” The NWS said on Friday. Temperatures are expected to return to “near-normal” by Wednesday.

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Living in a neighborhood with a high concentration of trees could significantly lower levels of inflammation and, importantly, decrease the risk of heart disease, new research from Green Heart Louisville’s first wave of clinical research from its HEAL study shows.

Aruni Bhatnagar, the medical professor and cardiology researcher at the University of Louisville who is spearheading the project, told The Washington Post that he wanted to “do something” about the air pollution plaguing the city. His solution was to plant thousands of trees in Louisville neighborhoods and methodically study health data from participating residents to see the effect they had on health. 

“We are trying to see if we can decrease the rates of heart disease in a community,” Bhatnagar told NBC.

The results showed a “significant decrease” in levels of hs-CRP, an important marker for inflammation, in areas where tree and shrub counts were more than doubled. In excess, inflammation is known to contribute to a laundry list of diseases and illnesses, including cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, obesity, and as the study points out, heart disease. 

“I wouldn’t have expected such a strong biomarker response, Peter James, director of the Center for Occupational and Environmental Health at the University of California, Davis School of Medicine, told NBC. “And that speaks to maybe something truly is causal here with how trees impact health.” 

Bhatnagar is leading dozens of researchers who are monitoring the health data from more than 750 participants, who range from 25 to 75 years old. The participants are part of a middle-income neighborhood, which tend to have both fewer trees and worse health outcomes compared to affluent neighborhoods.

^{Map of the Green Heart Louisville Project area showing neighborhoods where trees were planted and those where no trees were planted for the project. University of Louisville}

Some previous research has shown that people living in greener spaces tend to have better health outcomes, but the fact that most of those greener spaces happened to be in wealthy areas raises some questions. Namely, whether living in green areas can truly lead to improved health, or whether there were other factors to consider, like socioeconomic-related differences in levels of elevated stress — which has also been shown to lead to inflammation — or access to healthcare.

“We can’t just go, ‘Oh, look, this is [a] greener place and people are happier’ because most places that are greener are richer, etc.,” Bhatnagar told The Washington Post. He also mentioned his interest in the Bradford Hill criteria of causation, a group of nine scientific principles to determine whether there is a true causal — or cause and effect — relationship between two correlated things, or if the correlation is merely coincidental.

“Although several previous studies have found an association between living in areas of high surrounding greenness and health, this is the first study to show that a deliberate increase in greenness in the neighborhood can improve health,” Bhatnagar told Medical Xpress. “With these results and additional studies that we hope to report soon, we are closer to understanding the impact of local tree cover on residents’ health. This finding will bolster the push to increase urban greenspaces.”

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