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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 »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 »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 »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 »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 […]
Read more »Via Project Syndicate, commentary on how – while the rest of the world is mainly concerned about the energy disruptions caused by the Iran war – the Gulf countries are more anxious about the Islamic Republic’s threats to their desalination facilities: The oil-rich monarchies of the Persian Gulf are often described as petrostates. But the […]
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