Using a recently invented technique, scientists counted on average 240,000 detectable fragments of plastic per liter of water in popular brands — between 10-100 times higher than prior estimates — raising potential health concerns that require further study.

“If people are concerned about nanoplastics in bottled water, it’s reasonable to consider alternatives like tap water,” Beizhan Yan, an associate research professor of geochemistry at Columbia University and a co-author of the paper told AFP.

But he added: “We do not advise against drinking bottled water when necessary, as the risk of dehydration can outweigh the potential impacts of nanoplastics exposure.”

There has been rising global attention in recent years on microplastics, which break off from bigger sources of plastic and are now found everywhere from the polar ice caps to mountain peaks, rippling through ecosystems and finding their way into drinking water and food.

While microplastics are anything under 5 millimeters, nanoplastics are defined as particles below 1 micrometer, or a billionth of a meter — so small they can pass through the digestive system and lungs, entering the bloodstream directly and from there to organs, including the brain and heart. They can also cross the placenta into the bodies of unborn babies.

There is limited research on their impacts on ecosystems and human health, though some early lab studies have linked them to toxic effects, including reproductive abnormalities and gastric issues.

To study nanoparticles in bottled water, the team used a technique called Stimulated Raman Scattering (SRS) microscopy, which was recently invented by one of the paper’s co-authors, and works by probing samples with two lasers tuned to make specific molecules resonate, revealing what they are to a computer algorithm.

They tested three leading brands but chose not to name them, “because we believe all bottled water contain nanoplastics, so singling out three popular brands could be considered unfair,” said Yan.

The results showed between 110,000 to 370,000 particles per liter, 90 percent of which were nanoplastics while the rest were microplastics.

The most common type was nylon — which probably comes from plastic filters used to purify the water– followed by polyethylene terephthalate or PET, which is what bottles are themselves made from, and leaches out when the bottle is squeezed. Other types of plastic enter the water when the cap is opened and closed.

Next, the team hopes to probe tap water, which has also been found to contain microplastics, though at far lower levels.

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The country’s biggest water supplier has previously announced a three-year plan to improve its operational and financial performance.

But joint interim chief executive Alastair Cochran said: “This turnaround will take some time and we won’t completely complete the job in three years.

“We do believe we have a comprehensive plan in place to deliver material benefits to our customers,” he told a parliamentary committee.

The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee called a number of Thames Water bosses to give evidence about its debts.

Thames Water supplies 15 million customers in London and the Thames Valley area of southeast England and has net debts of nearly £15 billion ($19 billion).

Last week the company said its profit after tax tumbled 57 percent to £172.3 million in the six months to the end of September.

Its precarious financial situation worried the government so much earlier this year that it fuelled speculation about a possible public rescue plan.

“We were very fragile in July,” chairman Adrian Montague told the MPs.

“The chief executive resigned without notice 10 days before a change of chairman. The financial markets took fright.

“We have stabilised the business. We have finalised our business plan. We have raised more money. We’ve got a turnaround plan. There is a process under way to try to identify a new chief executive.

“We need to make a fresh shot.”

In July, Thames Water received assurances of £750 million of new shareholder funding between now and 2025, short of the £1 billion it was seeking on top of the £500 million it secured in March.

Thames, which blames its situation on regulatory limits on price increases for customers, says it would need a further £2.5 billion of support between 2025 and 2030.

It also wants its creditors to extend the maturity on a debt of £190 million, which matures in April next year.

The UK’s water companies have been criticised for a number of years for wastewater discharges into rivers and the sea because of a lack of investment in upgrading sewage networks, many of which date from the 19th century.

Improvements will cost billions but the firms have accumulated more than £60 billion in debt since they were privatised in 1989 under prime minister Margaret Thatcher.

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The civil suit, filed by New York Attorney General Letitia James in New York state Supreme Court, seeks a finding that PepsiCo contributed to a “public nuisance” in the Buffalo River; the imposition of financial penalties and compensatory damages on the company; and an order that PepsiCo cease the sale of single-use plastic on goods that do not warn of the environmental ills.

“All New Yorkers have a basic right to clean water, yet PepsiCo’s irresponsible packaging and marketing endanger Buffalo’s water supply, environment, and public health,” James said in a statement.

“No one should have to worry about plastics in their drinking water, plastic garbage littering their scenic riverfront, or plastic pollution harming wildlife.”

PepsiCo did not immediately respond to a request from AFP for comment.

A survey by James’ office found that PepsiCo’s plastic packaging was by far the greatest source of Buffalo River plastic  pollution, three times as abundant as the next contributor (McDonald’s), according to the suit.

The plastics “cause wide-ranging harms to the public and New York State,” said the suit, which points to the presence of microplastics throughout the human body and fish game species.

Health-related problems “include early puberty in females, reduced sperm counts, altered functions of reproductive organs, obesity, altered sex-specific behaviors and increased rates of some kinds of cancers,” said the suit.

The lawsuit acknowledges company statements pledging action to reduce plastic pollution, but depicts PepsiCo as repeatedly falling short of pledges.

Further, the suit says PepsiCo has not chosen alternatives to single-use plastics to any significant degree in the New York market. In contrast, PepsiCo has announced refillable and returnable glass and plastic programs in international markets including Mexico and Germany, according to the suit.

The post PepsiCo sued by New York state over plastic pollution appeared first on Digital Journal.

“A staggering 347 million children under 18 are exposed to high or extremely high water scarcity in South Asia, the highest number among all regions in the world,” the UN children’s agency said in a report.

The eight-nation region, comprising Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Maldives, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, is home to more than one-quarter of the world’s children.

“Climate change is disrupting weather patterns and rainfall, leading to unpredictable water availability,” the UN said in its report.

The report cites poor water quality, lack of water and mismanagement such as over-pumping of aquifers, while climate change decreases the amount of water replenishing them.

“When village wells go dry, homes, health centres and schools are all affected,” UNICEF added.

“With an increasingly unpredictable climate, water scarcity is expected to become worse for children in South Asia.”

At the UN COP28 climate conference in December in Dubai, UNICEF said it will call for leaders “to secure a livable planet”.

“Safe water is a basic human right,” said Sanjay Wijesekera, UNICEF chief for South Asia.

“Yet millions of children in South Asia don’t have enough to drink in a region plagued by floods, droughts and other extreme weather events, triggered increasingly by climate change”.

Last year, 45 million children lacked access to basic drinking water services in South Asia, more than any other region, but UNICEF said services were expanding rapidly, with that number slated to be halved by 2030.

Behind South Asia was Eastern and Southern Africa, where 130 million children are at risk from severe water scarcity, the report added.

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Ahmed Hamid, 43, fled Gaza City with his wife and seven children, heading to Rafah after the Israeli army on Friday warned residents of the north of the enclave to head south “for their own safety”.

“We haven’t showered in days. Even going to the toilet requires waiting your turn in a line,” Hamid told AFP. 

“There is no food. All goods are not available and the costs of what is available have surged. The only foods we find are tuna cans and cheese.

“I feel like a burden, unable to do anything.”

The UN estimates that about one million people have been displaced since Israel began a relentless aerial bombardment of Gaza in retaliation for Hamas’s deadly assault on October 7.

The Hamas attack left more than 1,400 people dead on the Israeli side, most of them civilians.

On the Gazan side, at least 2,670 have died in the relentless bombing, the majority of them ordinary Palestinians.

Israel also cut off all water, electricity and food supplies to the densely-populated coastal enclave, before resuming water to the south on Sunday.

Mona Abdel Hamid, 55, left her home in Gaza City, heading for her relatives’ house in Rafah. 

Instead, she found herself in the home of people she did not know.

“I feel humiliation and embarrassment. I’m looking for refuge. We don’t have a lot of clothes and most of them are dirty now, with no water to wash them,” she said.

“No electricity, no water, no internet. I feel like I’m losing my humanity.”

– ‘Lives in displacement’ –

Since Friday, Sabah Masbah, 50, has lived with her husband, daughter and 21 other relatives at a friend’s home in Rafah.

“The worst and most dangerous thing is that we can’t find water. None of us bathe now because the water is so scarce,” she told AFP.

At his home in Khan Yunis, near a school run by the UN agency supporting Palestinian refugees, Esam said: “We received guests who were displaced from the Gaza City area, the Al-Rimal neighbourhood and Tal al-Hawa.”

But “water is a problem”, said the 23-year-old who did not wish to give his full name.

 “Every day we think of how to get water… If we bathe, we won’t drink.”

Those who have sought refuge at the UNRWA schools also desperately seek food and water.

The UN agency’s director of communications, Juliette Touma, told AFP more people are likely to become displaced “as people continue to leave their homes”.

Israel is massing forces and weapons at the border with Gaza ahead of an expected ground offensive.

Despite the Israeli evacuation order, there were air strikes in the south, including in Rafah, where one resident said a doctor’s house was targeted.

“All the family was wiped out,” said Khamis Abu Hilal.

Alaa al-Hams pointed to the fresh signs of shelling on a neighbourhood in Rafah.

“I look at the massive destruction. They say there is terrorism here. Where is the humanity they speak of?” he said.

“All are civilians here, with nothing to do with any organisations, but they died… no one is left alive.”

Samira Kassab stands on the remains of what was once her home in Rafah, asking: “Where will we go? Where are the Arab countries?

“We have spent our whole lives in displacement. Our home, which housed all my children, was struck… We slept in the street and there is nothing left,” she said.

“We are isolated. My daughter has cancer and I can’t take her to the hospital. I myself suffer from hypertension and diabetes.”

But she defiantly raised the victory sign with her hand.

Surrounded by her grandchildren she said: “I won’t leave no matter what, even if I die. We beg for bread from our neighbours, but we will not part with a grain of sand.”

The post ‘If we bathe, we won’t drink’: Gazans struggle as water supplies dwindle appeared first on Digital Journal.

Ethiopia this month announced the completion of the fourth and final filling of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, prompting immediate condemnation from Cairo, which denounced the move as illegal.

Egypt and Sudan fear the massive $4.2-billion dam will severely reduce the share of Nile water they receive and had repeatedly asked Addis Ababa to stop filling it until an agreement was reached.

For years at loggerheads over the issue, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed agreed in July to finalise a deal within four months, resuming talks in August.

Ethiopia’s foreign ministry wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, that the three countries had opened a second round of negotiations in Addis Ababa.

“Ethiopia is committed to reaching a negotiated and amicable solution through the ongoing trilateral process,” it said.

– Fears over water access –

Protracted negotiations over the dam since 2011 have thus far failed to bring about an agreement between Ethiopia and its downstream neighbours.

Egypt has long viewed the dam as an existential threat, as it relies on the Nile for 97 percent of its water needs.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry, in an address to the UN General Assembly, said that Cairo wanted a “binding agreement” on the filling and operation of the dam.

“We remain in anticipation of our goodwill being reciprocated with a commitment from Ethiopia to arrive at an agreement that will safeguard the interests of Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia,” Shoukry said.

“It would be a mistake to assume we can accept a fait accompli when it comes to the very lives of more than 100 million Egyptian citizens.”

The dam is central to Ethiopia’s development plans, and in February 2022 Addis Ababa announced that it had begun generating electricity for the first time.

At full capacity, the huge hydroelectric dam — 1.8 kilometres long and 145 metres high — could generate more than 5,000 megawatts. 

That would double Ethiopia’s production of electricity, to which only half the country’s population of 120 million currently has access.

The position of Sudan, which is currently mired in a civil war, has fluctuated in recent years. 

The United Nations says Egypt could “run out of water by 2025” and parts of Sudan, where the Darfur conflict was essentially a war over access to water, are increasingly vulnerable to drought as a result of climate change. 

The post Ethiopia, Egypt, Sudan resume Nile dam talks appeared first on Digital Journal.

The Jazlah plant in Jubail city applies the latest technological advances in a country that first turned to desalination more than a century ago, when Ottoman-era administrators enlisted filtration machines for hajj pilgrims menaced by drought and cholera.

Lacking lakes, rivers and regular rainfall, Saudi Arabia today relies instead on dozens of facilities that transform water from the Gulf and Red Sea into something potable, supplying cities and towns that otherwise would not survive.

But the kingdom’s growing desalination needs –- fuelled by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s dreams of presiding over a global business and tourism hub –- risk clashing with its sustainability goals, including achieving net-zero emissions by 2060.

Projects like Jazlah, the first plant to integrate desalination with solar power on a large scale, are meant to ease that conflict: officials say the panels will help save around 60,000 tons of carbon emissions annually.

It is the type of innovation that must be scaled up fast, with Prince Mohammed targeting a population of 100 million people by 2040, up from 32.2 million today.

“Typically, the population grows, and then the quality of life of the population grows,” necessitating more and more water, said CEO Marco Arcelli of ACWA Power, which runs Jazlah.

Using desalination to keep pace is a “do or die” challenge, said historian Michael Christopher Low at the University of Utah, who has studied the kingdom’s struggle with water scarcity.

“This is existential for the Gulf states. So when anyone is sort of critical about what they’re doing in terms of ecological consequences, I shake my head a bit,” he said.

At the same time, he added, “there are limits” as to how green desalination can be.

– Drinking the sea –

The search for potable water bedevilled Saudi Arabia in the first decades after its founding in 1932, spurring geological surveys that contributed to the mapping of its massive oil reserves.

Prince Mohammed al-Faisal, a son of King Faisal whom Low has dubbed the “Water Prince”, at one point even explored the possibility of towing icebergs from Antarctica to quench the kingdom’s growing thirst, drawing widespread ridicule.

But Prince Mohammed also oversaw the birth of the kingdom’s modern desalination infrastructure beginning in 1970.

The national Saline Water Conversion Corporation (SWCC) now reports production capacity of 11.5 million cubic metres per day at 30 facilities.

That growth has come at a cost, especially at thermal plants running on fossil fuels.

By 2010, Saudi desalination facilities were consuming 1.5 million barrels of oil per day, more than 15 percent of today’s production.

The Ministry of Environment, Water and Agriculture did not respond to AFP’s request for comment on current energy consumption at desalination plants.

Going forward, there is little doubt Saudi Arabia will be able to build the infrastructure required to produce the water it needs.

“They have already done it in some of the most challenging settings, like massively desalinating on the Red Sea and providing desalinated water up to the highlands of the holy cities in Mecca and Medina,” said Laurent Lambert of the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies.

– Going green? –

The question is how much the environmental toll will continue to climb.

The SWCC says it wants to cut 37 million metric tonnes of carbon emissions by 2025.

This will be achieved largely by transitioning away from thermal plants to plants like Jazlah that use electricity-powered reverse osmosis.

Solar power, meanwhile, will expand to 770 megawatts from 120 megawatts today, according to the SWCC’s latest sustainability report, although the timeline is unclear.

“It’s still going to be energy-intensive, unfortunately, but energy-intensive compared to what?” Lambert said.

“Compared to countries which have naturally flowing water from major rivers or falling from the sky for free? Yeah, sure, it’s always going to be more.”

At desalination plants across the kingdom, Saudi employees understand just how crucial their work is to the population’s survival.

The Ras al-Khair plant produces 1.1 million cubic metres of water per day –- 740,000 from thermal technology, the rest from reverse osmosis –- and struggles to keep reserve tanks full because of high demand.

Much of the water goes to Riyadh, which requires 1.6 million cubic metres per day and could require as much as six million by the end of the decade, said an employee who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to brief the media.

Looking out over pipes that draw seawater from the Gulf into the plant, he described the work as high-stakes, with clear national security implications.

If the plant did not exist, he said, “Riyadh would die”.

The post Water-starved Saudi confronts desalination’s heavy toll appeared first on Digital Journal.

Six of nine planetary boundaries — climate change, deforestation, biodiversity loss, synthetic chemicals including plastics, freshwater depletion, and nitrogen use — are already deep in the red zone, an international team of 29 scientists reported.

Two of the remaining three — ocean acidification along with the concentration of particle pollution and dust in the atmosphere — are borderline, with only ozone depletion comfortably within safe bounds.

The planetary boundaries identify “the important processes that keep the Earth within the kind of the living conditions that prevailed over the last 10,000 years, the period when humanity and modern civilisation developed”, said lead author Katherine Richardson, a professor at the University of Copenhagen’s Globe Institute.

The study is the second major update of the concept, first unveiled in 2009 when only global warming, extinction rates, and nitrogen had transgressed their limits.

“We are still moving in the wrong direction,” said co-author Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and a co-creator of the schema. 

“And there’s no indications that any of the boundaries” — except the ozone layer, slowly on the mend since the chemicals destroying it were banned — “have started to bend in the right direction”, he told journalists in a briefing.  

“This means we are losing resilience, that we are putting the stability of the Earth system at risk.”

The study quantifies boundaries for all nine interlocking facets of the Earth system.

– Headed for disaster –

For biodiversity, for example, if the rate at which species disappear is less than 10 times the average extinction rate over the last 10 million years, that is deemed acceptable.

In reality, however, extinctions are occurring at least 100 times faster than this so-called background rate, and 10 times faster than the planetary boundary limit.

For climate change, that threshold is keyed to the concentration of atmospheric CO2, which remained very close to 280 parts per million (ppm) for at least 10,000 years prior to the industrial revolution.

That concentration is today 417 ppm, far above the safe boundary of 350 ppm. 

“On climate, we’re still following a pathway that takes us unequivocally to disaster,” said Rockstrom. “We’re headed for 2.5C, 2.6C or 2.7C — a place we haven’t seen for the past four million years.”  

“There’s no evidence whatsoever that humans can survive in that environment,” he added. 

Thousands upon thousands of chemical compounds created by humans — from micro-plastics and pesticides to nuclear waste and drugs that have leached into the environment — were quantified for the first time in the new research, and found to exceed safe limits.

Likewise for the depletion of “green” and “blue” water, freshwater coming from soil and plants on the one hand, and from rivers and lakes on the other. 

– Setting limits –

An important finding of the new update is that different  boundaries feed off and amplify each other.

The study examines in particular the interaction between increasing CO2 concentration and damage to the biosphere, especially forest loss, and projects temperature increases when one or both increase.  

It shows that even if humanity rapidly draws down greenhouse gas emissions, unless destruction of carbon-absorbing forests is halted at the same time rising global temperatures could tip the planet onto a trajectory of additional warming that would be hard to stop.

“Next to climate change, integrity of the biosphere is the second pillar for our planet,” said co-author Wolfgang Lucht, head of Earth System Analysis at PIK.

“We are currently destabilising this pillar by taking out too much biomass, destroying too much habitat, deforesting too much land.” 

All the boundaries can be brought back into the safe operating space, the study concluded. 

“It’s just a question of setting limits for the amount of waste we put into the open environment and the amount of living and non-living raw materials we take out,” said Richardson.

Hotly debated at first, the planetary boundaries framework quickly became a pillar of Earth system science, with its influence extending today into the realm of policy and even business.     

The post Humanity deep in the danger zone of planetary boundaries: study appeared first on Digital Journal.

The Israeli-Palestinian dispute centres on land but also on the water resources that sustain life in the sun-parched land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan river.

Hopes for peace were high when then-Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat shook hands with Israeli premier Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993, watched by US president Bill Clinton.

The historic deal they struck created a limited degree of Palestinian self-rule and was intended as a first step toward resolving the status of Jerusalem and the plight of Palestinian refugees.

The ultimate goal for many was the creation of a Palestinian state whose people would one day live freely and peacefully alongside Israel.

Instead, three decades on, Israeli settlements have mushroomed across the occupied West Bank, deadly violence has flared, and the blockaded Gaza Strip is littered with the ruins of several wars.

For Palestinian farmer Bassam Dudin, the most immediate concern is that he can no longer draw water from his wells, since Israeli forces came in July and poured cement into them.

“They didn’t give me any advance warning,” said Dudin, 47, standing amid sun-scorched vegetables on his field at Al-Hijra village in the West Bank’s southern Hebron area.

“We are living in a very, very difficult situation.”

Israeli military authorities argued that Dudin, who holds a land title dating back to the era of Ottoman rule over historic Palestine, had tapped the groundwater illegally.

The body running civilian affairs in the Palestinian territories, COGAT, argued that the wells were “drilled in violation of the construction agreement, harmed the natural water sources and posed a risk of contamination of the aquifer”.

– ‘Mickey Mouse forum’ –

The peace push of 1993 was meant to secure both Israelis and Palestinians fair access to water from the Jordan river, the Sea of Galilee, and the Mountain and Coastal Aquifers that stretch below the divided land.

But today, Palestinians complain of unequal access to clean water, even as Israel boasts a world-class system with vast underground tunnels and pipes, coastal desalination plants, high-efficiency water usage and wastewater recycling.

Israel, which has occupied the West Bank since the Six-Day War of 1967, now controls its water infrastructure through the national water company Mekorot.

The Israeli firm also supplies 22 percent of water used by Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, according to Palestinian data.

Dudin is not allowed to dig for water on his land without permission, under rules that were cemented by the Oslo Accords of the 1990s and follow-up agreements.

His farm lies in the 60 percent of the West Bank that was declared “Area C” and placed under Israeli army control. (Area A is administered by the Palestinians and Area B is under mixed Israeli and Palestinian control.)

Area C residents must seek Israeli permits for any construction, including wells, but in practice these are almost impossible to obtain.

This is despite the establishment of a Joint Water Committee under the Accords.

Palestinian former water negotiator Shaddad Attili ridiculed the committee as a “Mickey Mouse forum” in which, he said, Israel often rejects projects or stalls them for years.

“Whenever we say no to an Israeli project, they implement it anyway, because they do have the power,” he charged.

Israel’s Water Authority declined to be interviewed and directed AFP to COGAT, which also refused repeated requests to discuss the topic.

– Dusty water pipes –

Rows of date palms and banana plants ring vegetable fields near the West Bank city of Jericho in the verdant Jordan Valley, seen as the Palestinian breadbasket.

Birdsong is interrupted by the occasional roar of Israeli warplanes above in the area from which, as well as from parts of the Gaza Strip, Israeli forces were meant to withdraw under the Oslo Accords.

But in many villages in the Jericho area too, water scarcity is an urgent problem, the result of what residents describe as unfair distribution of resources.

Looking at his dusty water pipes, farmer Diab Attiyyat said his farmland in Israeli-controlled Area C receives water just once a week, pumped from the Al-Auja spring a few kilometres away.

Attiyat harnesses drip irrigation to use the water sparingly.

“The situation is really miserable,” said the 42-year-old, who receives support from the UN World Food Programme. 

“You live in difficulty and stagnation. Sometimes the Al-Auja spring is operational and sometimes it’s cut off.”

In Palestinian-controlled Jericho city, part of Area A, there is water aplenty. Springs feed several water parks and palatial villas boast private swimming pools.

But Attili, the former negotiator, said the costs of pumping water to even nearby communities, and the difficulty of obtaining permissions, make it impossible to fairly distribute the water.

Daily water use around Jericho is about 183 litres per person — more than double the average 86 litres elsewhere in the Palestinian territories excluding annexed east Jerusalem, according to 2021 data from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.

Attiyyat, the farmer, is galled too: “This bothers me, when I see others wasting water.”

– ‘Not fit for consumption’ –

Water scarcity is no problem in the Israeli settlement bloc of Gush Etzion, said its spokesman Josh Hasten.

The Gush Etzion settlements, like other ones across the West Bank, are deemed illegal under international law and have expanded massively since the 1990s.

Excluding east Jerusalem, the occupied territory is now home to around 490,000 Israeli settlers.

Hasten praised the massive investments in seawater desalination, which now supplies 63 percent of Israeli domestic usage, and other “advancements and improvements”.

He slammed the Oslo Accords as “a complete disaster in every which way, shape or form” and accused the Palestinian Authority of mismanaging natural resources.

Water scarcity suffered by Palestinians is most acute in Gaza, the crowded and impoverished coastal enclave blockaded by Israel that is home to around 2.3 million people.

Past wars and restrictions on imports of construction materials, spare parts and fuel have devastated much of Gaza’s water and sanitation infrastructure, driving a public health crisis.

“Water in Gaza isn’t fit for human consumption,” said water plant technician Zain al-Abadeen, who blamed high salinity from seawater intrusion into the depleted aquifer.

In some districts, children bring plastic bottles to free drinking water stations run by charities, while wealthier residents pay private companies who deliver water by truck.

“Water is life” reads a slogan on the wall of one of Gaza’s three small desalination plants, where Abadeen works.

The EU-funded plants now serve some 40 percent of the domestic needs of Gaza’s people, according to the Coastal Municipalities Water Utility, but Abadeen said their expansion is urgently needed.

Access to safe water is a basic human right and the issue must be decoupled from politics, campaigners argue.

Nada Majdalani, Palestine director of the group EcoPeace, said that, three decades after the Oslo Accords, “there needs to be a holistic mechanism of managing water resources that would meet all needs.”

Her Israeli counterpart Gidon Bromberg said it is “madness” that the water issue is still tied to a broader peace deal.

“We need the political will from both governments, both Israel and the Palestinian Authority, to recognise that the underlying rationale no longer holds water,” he said.

The post Palestinian water woes highlight dashed hopes of Oslo Accords appeared first on Digital Journal.

That is the capacity level to which Istanbul’s water reservoirs have dropped after another steamy summer put Turkey’s largest city on the edge of a potential catastrophe.

Aydin does not want to sow panic and speaks in reassuring tones.

The rainy season is approaching and water levels should pick up in the coming weeks.

But Aydin admits what the city’s 16 million official — and 20 million estimated — inhabitants have known for some time.

“We’ve had a dry season,” the water and sewage administration chief said.

“Water levels were at 60 percent this time last year,” he said. “It dropped down to 14 percent in 2014, so this is the second-lowest in the past 10 years.”

Istanbul is surrounded by a web of 11 dams that fill up with water when the heaviest precipitation falls in November and December.

But global warming caused by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions is changing weather patterns and giving Aydin constant stress.

Istanbul has had barely any precipitation at all this summer and water usage has soared because of the heat.

Turkey as a whole experienced the hottest July on record and broke the 50-degree Celsius (122-degrees Fahrenheit) mark for the first time in modern history on August 14.

– Booming growth –

The city could ship in extra supplies of water by sea or road should the dams run completely dry — although no specific plans have been laid yet for that gloomy possibility.

Istanbul’s problems are compounded by its phenomenal growth.

The city had almost as many dams when its population was just over five million people 30 years ago and water consumption was not a hot topic in the news.

Officials now make regular media appearances pressing Istanbulites to conserve water any way they can.

Aydin’s department sent a mass text message during a particularly hot spell warning that the situation was becoming unsustainable.

“The storage volume of our dams in Istanbul is approximately 868 million cubic metres. But Istanbul’s annual consumption is 1.1 billion cubic metres,” Aydin told AFP.

“Istanbul’s (dams) do not have enough water to last a full year. Istanbul is a city in need of continuous rainfall. Our groundwater is not enough.”

The lack of rain is turning some parts of the emptied dams into rolling meadows that flocks of sheep and goats roam on the city’s outskirts.

Pensioner Nejat Karakas grew up around water and likes to visit the dams to while away the time.

He leaned glumly against the side of an upturned rowboat lying on the cracked dry bed and contemplated climate change.

“It makes me sad. We’re not used to seeing it like this,” the 68-year-old said. “If there is no rain between now and October, bad days await Istanbul.”

– Worried youth –

Aydin’s attempts to raise awareness and change Istanbulites’ habits appear to be making some inroads.

Driver Hasan Sadikoglu said he has fitted a large plastic bottle into his toilet tank to conserve a litre of water with every flush.

“When the children brush their teeth, the tap is opened and closed,” the 53-year-old said. “One brush, one open.”

Aydin’s department has also announced plans to instal special devices on faucets of households that consume more than a set amount of water every month.

The idea is to reduce households’ water pressure once the usage limit is breached.

“Very effective measures should be taken, especially in water management,” Aydin said. “Saving is a priority, recycling is a priority.”

Student Mine Altintas said she already tries to conserve water while washing dishes and doing laundry.

But she worries that this will not be enough.

“All of us, the whole country and even the whole world, is worried,” the 18-year-old said.

“I don’t know what will happen in 10 years. I am still young, and I don’t know how much water we will have later on.”

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