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Desalination: By The Numbers
April 10th, 2026
Via Technology Review, a detailed look at desalination technology, an increasingly important water source: When I started digging into desalination technology for a new story, I couldn’t help but obsess over the numbers. I’d known on some level that desalination—pulling salt out of seawater to produce fresh water—was an increasingly important technology, especially in water-stressed […]
Read more »The Colorado River Is Effectively Insolvent — And Corporate Water Users May Not Have Priced It
April 9th, 2026
Via Todd Cort’s informative Substack, commentary on the Colorado River, a climate-induced bankruptcy sitting on the balance sheet: Imagine that a company had a pension fund that promised $16.5 billion in future payouts but the value of that fund today sits at only $12.4 billion. Moreover, that pension fund has been drawing down the balance […]
Read more »Confluence Beyond Borders in a Changing Climate: Dialogue for Cooperation in Central Asia and Afghanistan
April 9th, 2026
Courtesy of SIWI, a new report examining water cooperation in Central Asia and Afghanistan: The region of Central Asia and Afghanistan faces growing water insecurity and natural hazards amidst a rapidly changing climate with rising temperatures, extreme weather events, and glacial melt affecting the volume, peak, and variability of river flows. Increased water scarcity and […]
Read more »Why the Aral Sea’s Restoration Matters Beyond Central Asia
April 3rd, 2026
Via The Diplomat, a report on how the Aral Sea’s story demonstrates how human actions can profoundly alter natural systems, yet it also shows that determined cooperation can begin to repair environmental damage that once seemed irreversible: Few environmental disasters illustrate the consequences of human mismanagement as starkly as the fate of the Aral Sea. Once the […]
Read more »Qosh-Tepa Looks Like a Disaster. Uzbekistan Thinks Otherwise.
April 3rd, 2026
Via Havli substack, commentary on how Central Asian countries are able to use their position as power exporters for leverage as Taliban-run Afghanistan presses ahead with an ambitious canal project. If Shavkat Khamroyev is feeling nervous these days, he is doing a good job of hiding it. After all, Uzbekistan’s water resources minister would have […]
Read more »‘The Precedent Is Flint’: How Oregon’s Data Center Boom Is Supercharging a Water Crisis
March 29th, 2026
Courtesy of Rolling Stone, an insightful report on how Amazon has come to Oregon’s eastern farmland, worsening a water pollution problem that’s been linked to cancer and miscarriages: In the spring of 2022, Jim Doherty kept having the same conversation with folks at the only grocery store in Boardman, his eastern Oregon hometown, or at the grain […]
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