Four International Water Stories to Watch in 2021

Water will direct the course of history again this year, through events small and large. 

The fallout from the pandemic will continue to cast a shadow. So will negotiations between countries that share major rivers with unsettled politics, like the Mekong and Nile. And with famine warnings, hunger is on the rise as well, highlighting the punishment that overlapping environmental crises can wield.

Grape Crop Brings in Millions, but Farm Workers Live a Harsh Life

Located about 50 kilometers from the Noordoewer border post that separates Namibia from neighboring South Africa, Aussenkehr has vast vineyards that stretch as far as the eye can see.

Surrounded by a semi-desert area, the vineyards thrive only because of a plentiful supply of water from the nearby Orange River, which forms a natural border between the two countries. Set against the harsh, brown terrain, the verdant vineyards — which have grapes that can be harvested three to five weeks earlier than elsewhere on the globe — seem alien compared to southern Namibia’s dry and harsh landscape.

But the oasis-like beauty of the area's grape farms hides a dark secret: the 16,000 farmworkers who care for the vines and harvest the grapes earn a pittance and live under harsh conditions. Two kilometers from the grape farms, they live in an unnamed settlement in rudimentary reed and zinc structures, and have endured decades without potable water and other basic services like electricity and sanitation facilities. Residents even use the river and mountains as toilets. 

In Trump Administration's Final-Days Deregulatory Push, Army Corps Reduce Stream Protections

The Army Corps of Engineers finalized a rule on January 4 that further retracts federal protections for the nation’s smallest streams.

The revisions to the nationwide permits, which authorize the filling and dredging of waterways, are one of a flurry of environmental deregulatory actions federal agencies are taking in the final days of the Trump administration, even though there is the possibility with a Democratic Congress that the Biden administration will reverse them.

Hotspots H2O:
River Dredging Near Chernobyl Risks Radioactive Water Contamination

Eight million people in Ukraine are in danger of drinking contaminated water due to the construction of an inland shipping route, reported The Guardian. Dredging the river that flows past the Chernobyl nuclear reactor could disturb radioactive elements that settled to the river bottom since the 1986 disaster.

What’s Up With Water – January 11, 2021

Featured coverage from this week’s episode of What’s Up With Water looks at: 

• Southeast Asia, where China has notified nations downstream of the Mekong that it is reducing the river's flow for 20 days. 
• New research, which warns that without action, land that is gradually sinking could affect nearly 20 percent of the world's population in a couple of decades. 
• The Tuni glacier in Bolivia, whose water is vanishing much faster than original forecasts predicted. 

As Global Poverty Rises, USAID Plans for Covid-Altered World

Until 2020, extreme poverty had been steadily falling across the globe since at least the 1980s. At the same time, hundreds of millions of people had gained access to proper water and sanitation services.

The spread of the new coronavirus has upended those trajectories. The World Bank estimates that an additional 88 million to 115 million people will enter extreme poverty in 2020 because of the pandemic. It’s the first time in two decades that progress has reversed. The bank reckons that as many as 150 million people could be affected through 2021 if the virus is not tamed.

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