 | | Saltwater intrusion on a corn field in Hyde County, NC. Lighter green areas are fallow/abandoned sections of the fields with salt concentrations too high to plant. Photo © Dr. Matthew Ricker / NCSU
Patchy fields. Low yields. Coastal agriculture is under threat from increasing rates of saltwater intrusion on the Atlantic Coast.
As sea levels rise, coastal storms increase, and land subsides, croplands are seeing stark decreases in productivity from salty soils. Many of our most important crops, like corn, soy, and wheat, cannot survive at even low levels of salinity - and fields are reaching new highs.
Many southeastern farmers have had to abandon their lands. Others are signing conservation easements to help their cropland transition to marsh. Still more are hopeful that they can continue farming with salt-tolerant crops.
Despite the adaptation strategies, NOAA projects 3 feet of relative sea level rise by 2100. Most of the affected coastal regions are less than 5 feet above sea level.
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 | | Data Source: U.S. Drought Monitor, Photo © J. Carl Ganter, Graphic © Delaney Nelson / Circle of Blue
Drought in the American West is impacting more than 130 million people. Here’s the latest:
- As of August 16, just over 49 percent of land area in the lower 48 states are in drought, down seven percentage points in the last month.
- The Gila River Indian Community pulls out of a water conservation agreement due to little progress on basin-wide water cuts.
- An Arizona agricultural coalition proposes the federal government pay farmers to conserve water.
- Top celebrities are among the highest water consumers in California, surpassing mandatory restrictions by over 150 percent.
Each week, Circle of Blue breaks down the biggest stories, the latest data, and the most promising solutions to the United States’ most urgent water crisis. Read Dry, your go-to news brief on the drying American West. |
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 | | Photo © J. Carl Ganter / Circle of Blue
What’s Up With Water — August 23, 2022
Tune into What's Up With Water for your need to know news of the world's water on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, and SoundCloud.
Featured coverage from this week's episode of What's Up With Water looks at: - Even as drought makes the headlines in the western United States, new research warns that public officials should also be planning for a an opposite risk: catastrophic floods. A massive winter rain and snow storm could hit California this century, with widespread damage to the country’s most populated state.
- In health news, a study from the Yale School of Public Health says that children living close to oil and gas fracking sites in Pennsylvania have a heightened risk of the leading form of pediatric cancer. Researchers based their work on 405 children who were diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia between 2009 and 2017.
This week Circle of Blue reports on the restrictive water cuts coming next year to the Colorado River basin. |
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 | | Residents of a new informal settlement outside Winburg gather to fill containers with water from a pipe supplied by the municipality. Sana Ntho, 54, said the water either has to be boiled or disinfected before drinking. With no electricity available, and firewood a scarce commodity, she adds a spoon of bleach to every 20-liter bucket of water. Photo © Steve Kretzmann / CCIJ
Living in a ‘Critical State’: The Price of a South African Town’s Dirty Water
The doors on the wastewater treatment plant in the rural South African town of Winberg are barred off. Shrubs and small trees are growing from the gutters and the cracks in the wall.
The plant is completely broken down, the Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism reports. This means that raw sewage released from the wastewater treatment plant flows directly into the town’s drinking water supplies. And even if the plant functioned properly, the town’s water purifying facility was never meant to filter out human waste.
Wastewater treatment works across the country are in a “critical state,” according to a recent government report. Nearly three-quarters of wastewater treatment plants in South Africa’s Free State aren’t compliant with wastewater discharge laws.
Some, including the Winberg facility, aren’t monitored at all.
Meanwhile, rivers and dams across the province are continuously polluted by sewage and millions of residents have to boil their drinking water, or fetch it from boreholes owned by individuals or institutions willing to share a potable supply.
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 | | Rice fields in the Mekong Delta, near Can Tho, Vietnam. An increase in groundwater irrigation in the region could affect groundwater availability across national borders. Photo © J. Carl Ganter / Circle of Blue
As Salt Builds Up in Soils Around The World, Farmers and Conservationists Seek Solutions
Millions of farmers around the world who is a victim of a build-up of salts in the soil, known as salinization. For Thi Tran, a young woman who farms 2 acres of rice and vegetables in the Ca Mau peninsula, poor drainage in the rice irrigation channels and sea-level rise has allowed saltwater to seep in from Vietnam's Mekong River delta, inundating her land.
The salinization of soils is not just a threat to Vietnam, John Vidal of Ensia wrote for Circle of Blue in 2019. The 2018 assessment of global land degradation by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), tasked with assessing the state of the natural world, says it is one of the major factors reducing plant growth and productivity worldwide, affecting around 20% of the world’s 740 million acres (300 million hectares) of irrigated farmland.
Soil salinity can be reversed, but it takes time and is expensive. In coastal areas of many developing countries, like Bangladesh, Vietnam and Thailand, where brackish or salty water is most common, many thousands of small farmers have switched from rice to shrimp farming. This is lucrative, but can be financially and ecologically risky, leading to more salinization and deforestation. The rush to shrimp farming has also led to conflict, with rice paddy fields being deliberately flooded in order to force farmers off their lands.
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