Escaping the Slum in Negative Numbers

UN says 230 million people escaped life in the slums since 2000

China and India made “giant strides”in their housing efforts to relocate nearly a quarter of billion people out of the slums, UN Habitat agency reported.

The housing efforts were canceled out, however, by global population growth and the rural migration to cities, the report said.

Here are some of the stats:

• Total  number of slum dwellers in 2000 were about 777 million
• Slum dwellers total this year:  827 million
• Percentage increase:  6.4%
• World population now: 6,809,167,223 (US Census Bureau)
• Population increase in the last 12 months:  75,395,78 (US Census Bureau)
• Percentage increase over the last 12 month: 1.1%

Note: Actual numbers of the slum dwellers are much larger, unless people  could live in decent accommodations on less than $1.25 per day. It appears that the report used the old figures instead of the newer revised figures. “International Comparison Program’s new poverty estimates released in August 2008 show that about 1.4 billion people in the developing world (one in four) were living on less than $1.25 a day in 2005,” World Bank reported.

EDRO estimate for the number of people living on less than$1.25 per day: 2.2 billion (nearly 1 in 3 globally).

A Mumbai slum (India). Image may be subject to copyright.

UN defines a dwelling as a slum if at least one of the five factors below applies:

• Lacks a permanent structure (see image)
• More than three people sharing a room
• Has no access to sufficient, or affordable water. Alternatively, it requires extreme effort to obtain water.
• No private toilet or a public one shared with a maximum of a dozen or so people.
• Comes without secure tenure

Related Links:

• Emerging Food Crisis
• Giga Trends
• RC Matrix
• Collapsing Cities
• Facts on the Concentration of Wealth
• Global Poverty: The Gap Between the World’s Rich and Poor Is Growing, and the Dying Continues

Shrinking World, Shrinking Ecosystems

Temperature velocity for the 21st century is 0.42 kilometers (0.26 miles) per year: Study

Climate Change Puts Ecosystems on the Run

Global warming is causing climate belts to shift toward the poles and to higher elevations. To keep pace with these changes, the average ecosystem will need to shift about a quarter mile each year, says a new study led by scientists at the Carnegie Institution. For some habitats, such as low-lying areas, climate belts are moving even faster, putting many species in jeopardy, especially where human development has blocked migration paths.

“Expressed as velocities, climate-change projections connect directly to survival prospects for plants and animals. These are the conditions that will set the stage, whether species move or cope in place,” says study co-author Chris Field, director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology. Field is also a professor of biology and of environmental Earth system science at Stanford University and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment.

The research team, which included researchers from the Carnegie Institution, Stanford University, the California Academy of Sciences, and the University of California, Berkeley, combined data on current climate and temperature gradients worldwide with climate model projections for the next century to calculate the “temperature velocity” for different regions of the world. This velocity is a measure of how fast temperature zones are moving across the landscape as the planet warms―and how fast plants and animals will need to migrate to keep up.

EDRO Comments:

What the paper doesn’t mention, however, is the fact that the species “climbing a nearby mountain” in search of cooler temperatures would be climbing into an acid rain trap.

Forests and plants in mountain regions are heavily affected by “acid fog,” in addition to acid  rain. At higher altitudes, the lingering fog, which is more acidic than rainfall, surrounds the plants, affecting the leaves ability to carry out photosynthesis and produce photosynthetic products.

The acid fog does causes slower growth, disease and death of the plants and forests. Examples of this include the many areas of the eastern U.S., especially high altitude forests of the Appalachian Mountains.

The researchers found that as a global average, the expected temperature velocity for the 21st century is 0.42 kilometers (0.26 miles) per year. But this figure varies widely according to topography and habitat. In areas of high topographic relief, where species can find cooler temperatures by climbing a nearby mountain, velocities are relatively low. In flatter regions, such as deserts, grasslands, and coastal areas, species will have to travel farther to stay in their comfort zone and velocities may exceed a kilometer per year.

EDRO Comments:

The other factor is scarcity of food for many species due to the soil profiles of mountainous areas. Upland areas often have thin soils and glaciated bedrock, profiles that make it extremely difficult for plant growth.

Can the planet’s ecosystems keep up? Plants and animals that can tolerate a wide range of temperatures may not need to move. But for the others, survival becomes a race. After the glaciers of the last Ice Age retreated, forests may have spread northward as quickly as a kilometer a year. But current ecosystems are unlikely to match that feat, the researchers say. Nearly a third of the habitats in the study have velocities higher than even the most optimistic plant migration estimates. Even more problematic is the extensive fragmentation of natural habitats by human development, which will leave many species with “nowhere to go,” regardless of their migration rates.

Protected areas such as nature reserves are generally too small to accommodate the expected habitat shifts. According to the study, less than 10% of protected areas globally will maintain current climate conditions within their boundaries 100 years from now. This will present a challenge for many species adapted to highly specific conditions, especially if migration to new habitats is blocked.

Scott Loarie, a postdoctoral fellow at the Carnegie Institution and lead author of the paper, points out that an appreciation of climate velocities could stimulate discussions about sound management for climate change, from the design of nature reserves to the planning of assisted migrations for affected species. He adds that it should also stimulate discussion about strategies for minimizing the amount of warming and thereby help slow climate velocity.

The paper was published in the 24 December, 2009, Nature. Contact: Chris Field  cfield@ciw.edu

Related Links:

• Failing Ecosystems
• State of the World
• Shrinking World: Future in the Making
• Index of Human Impact on Nature (HIoN) March 2008

Major Blackout Plunges Brazil into Darkness

Another Warning Shot by Nature

Power failure in Brazil plunges its two largest cities into darkness

Tens of millions of people sat at home by candlelight as police urged then not to venture outside to prevent an upsurge in street crime.

A major power failure brought chaos to Brazil’s two largest cities,  Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, for several hours starting at 22:00local time (22:00 UTC).

Street lighting, stop lights, elevators, metro system and everything else that depended on electricity stopped functioning, exposing human vulnerability to electrical power loss.

A map of Brazil. Source: US govt.

Thousands of passengers were stranded as the metro railway systems in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo shut down.  Sao Paulo is home to nearly 20 million people, and Rio to another 15 million.

Tens of thousands of passengers had to walk along the underground tracks to reach stations, where buses provided an emergency service.

To prevent an upsurge in street crime, extra police were put on the streets, and residents in Sao Paulo and Rio were urged not to venture outside their homes.

The power failure was most likely caused by a major fault at the giant Itaipu hydroelectric dam, where a loss of up to 20,000 megawatts was reported after the distribution system was shut down by a storm.

Itaipu hydroelectric dam, Paraguay/Brazil. The world’s largest hydroelectric facility. Credit: Itaipu Binacional.

The hydroelectric generator at Itaipu dam, which supplies up to 22 percent of Brazil’s electricity, simply lost its entire output for several hours,  affecting at least 9 of Brazil’s 27 states.

Paraguay [population: 6.5 million,] which also relies on the Itaipu dam for 90% of its electricity, plunged  into darkness for about 15 minutes.

[Note: Brazil has a population of about 192 million.]

Soon, the US, EU countries, China, Japan … could experience similar disruptions…

See also: Murphy’s law is void of a time vector!

Related Links:

• The First Wave of the World’s Collapsing Cities
• The Fate of Energy Dinosaurs
• State of the World

• Failing Ecosystems
• Point of NO return
• Human Impact on Nature
• Is a Future Possible?
• Can Humans Enter the Next Phase of the Future?

• Emerging Scenarios
• Giga Trends
• Nuking Earth for Lifestyle

Human activity is sinking river deltas

Hundreds of millions of people face flooding

Most of the world’s major river deltas are sinking from human activity, increasing the risk of flooding which would affect hundreds of millions of people.

According to a new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder, “24 out of the world’s 33 major deltas are sinking and that 85 percent experienced severe flooding in recent years, resulting in the temporary submergence of roughly 100,000 square miles of land.”

About 14 percent of the world’s population, more than half a billion people who live on river deltas, will be affected.

Researchers calculated that 85% of major deltas have experienced severe flooding in the last decade, concluding that the area of flood prone zones will increase by about 50% in the next few decades as sea levels rise and more of the river deltas sink.

Media Report is included in full:

World’s River Deltas Sinking Due to Human Activity, Says New Study Led by CU-Boulder

A new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder indicates most of the world’s low-lying river deltas are sinking from human activity, making them increasingly vulnerable to flooding from rivers and ocean storms and putting tens of millions of people at risk.

While the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report concluded many river deltas are at risk from sea level rise, the new study indicates other human factors are causing deltas to sink significantly. The researchers concluded the sinking of deltas from Asia and India to the Americas is exacerbated by the upstream trapping of sediments by reservoirs and dams, man-made channels and levees that whisk sediment into the oceans beyond coastal floodplains, and the accelerated compacting of floodplain sediment caused by the extraction of groundwater and natural gas.

Figure below: An image of the Pearl River Delta in China taken by NASA’s space shuttle Endeavour during the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission in 2000. The areas below sea level are shown in purple. Image courtesy NASA, CSDMS, University of Colorado.

The study concluded that 24 out of the world’s 33 major deltas are sinking and that 85 percent experienced severe flooding in recent years, resulting in the temporary submergence of roughly 100,000 square miles of land. About 500 million people in the world live on river deltas.

Published in the Sept. 20 issue of Nature Geoscience, the study was led by CU-Boulder Professor James Syvitski, who is directing a $4.2 million effort funded by the National Science Foundation to model large-scale global processes on Earth like erosion and flooding. Known as the Community Surface Dynamic Modeling System, or CSDMS, the effort involves hundreds of scientists from dozens of federal labs and universities around the nation.

The Nature Geoscience authors predict that global delta flooding could increase by 50 percent under current projections of about 18 inches in sea level rise by the end of the century as forecast by the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. The flooding will increase even more if the capture of sediments upstream from deltas by reservoirs and other water diversion projects persists and prevents the growth and buffering of the deltas, according to the study.

“We argue that the world’s low-lying deltas are increasingly vulnerable to flooding, either from their feeding rivers or from ocean storms,” said CU-Boulder Research Associate Albert Kettner, a co-author on the study at CU-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research and member of the CSDMS team. “This study shows there are a host of human-induced factors that already cause deltas to sink much more rapidly than could be explained by sea level alone.”

Other study co-authors include CU-Boulder’s Irina Overeem, Eric Hutton and Mark Hannon, G. Robert Brakenridge of Dartmouth College, John Day of Louisiana State University, Charles Vorosmarty of City College of New York, Yoshiki Saito of the Geological Survey of Japan, Liviu Giosan of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and Robert Nichols of the University of Southampton in England.

The team used satellite data from NASA’s Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, which carried a bevy of radar instruments that swept more than 80 percent of Earth’s surface during a 12-day mission of the space shuttle Endeavour in 2000. The researchers compared the SRTM data with historical maps published between 1760 and 1922.

“Every year, about 10 million people are being affected by storm surges,” said CU-Boulder’s Overeem, also an INSTAAR researcher and CSDMS scientist. “Hurricane Katrina may be the best example that stands out in the United States, but flooding in the Asian deltas of Irrawaddy in Myanmar and the Ganges-Brahmaputra in India and Bangladesh have recently claimed thousands of lives as well.”

The researchers predict that similar disasters could potentially occur in the Pearl River delta in China and the Mekong River delta in Vietnam, where thousands of square miles are below sea level and the regions are hit by periodic typhoons.

“Although humans have largely mastered the everyday behaviour of lowland rivers, they seem less able to deal with the fury of storm surges that can temporarily raise sea level by three to 10 meters (10 to 33 feet),” wrote the study authors. “It remains alarming how often deltas flood, whether from land or from sea, and the trend seems to be worsening.”

“We are interested in how landscapes and seascapes change over time, and how materials like water, sediments and nutrients are transported from one place to another,” said Syvitski a geological sciences professor at CU-Boulder. “The CSDMS effort will give us a better understanding of Earth and allow us to make better predictions about areas at risk to phenomena like deforestation, forest fires, land-use changes and the impacts of climate change.”

For more information on INSTAAR visit instaar.colorado.edu/index.html. For more information on CSDMS visit csdms.colorado.edu/wiki/Main_Page.
© Regents of the University of Colorado

Related Links:

• Floods
• RC Matrix
• Drying Aquifers, Sinking Cities
• Collapsing Cities

• Land under 46 cities is sinking
• 14 pct of World Population Losing Habitat
• Good Bye, Tuvalu!
• Land Erosion Rates Accelarate
• Global Food Shortages

• Climate Change: For what you’re about to receive…
• Arctic Warmest in 2000 Years
• Another Ocean Record Broken
• US glaciers shrinking dramatically

Iraq Faces Environmental Catastrophe

Man-made disasters drive Iraq to the verge of ecological collapse

War of occupation and the near total destruction of infrastructure, drought and water shortages, desertification and sandstorms, collective ignorance and pathological violence, fear and political corruption, and mismanagement of resources are accelerating the pace of destruction in Iraq, hastening the collapse of local and regional ecosystems.

Plagued by frequent dust storms, Iraq is  being transformed from a fertile country to a dust bowl.
Iraq dust storms. July 4, 2009. U.S. soldiers walk through dust at Forward Operating Base Warhorse in Baqubah, Iraq. Decades of war and mismanagement, compounded by two years of drought, are transforming what was once the region’s most fertile area into a wasteland.

Iraq is now entering its third year of drought, with no relief in sight. Wells, marshes and riverbeds are drying up, “turning arable land into desert, killing trees and plants, and generally transforming what was once the region’s most fertile area into a wasteland.”

Falling agricultural production means that Iraq, once a food exporter, will this year have to import nearly 80% of its food, spending money that is urgently needed for reconstruction projects. LATimes reported.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this true-color image of Iraq on July 30, 2009, the second consecutive day of heavy dust over the country. Thick dust blows southeastward over the Tigris and Euphrates floodplain and the Persian Gulf. The dust is thick enough to completely hide the land surface and water bodies below. [Acquired: July 30, 2009]  NASA image by Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team, Goddard Space Flight Center. Caption by Michon Scott.

Iraq dust storms. A satellite image of  dust storm over Iraq on July 5. Since the start of 2009 summer, the storms have struck the country almost daily.

For earlier images of dust storms over Iraq click here.

Nearly 30 years of war and occupation is finally taking its toll. As the drought and mismanagement of land continue, the frequency and extent of sandstorms rise as if proportionally. The storms have become longer-lasting.

The Ministry of Agriculture reported that 90% of the land has either turned to desert or is experiencing severe desertification, with the remaining arable land eroding at an annual rate of 5%, LATimes reported.

The director-general of the ministry’s Department for Combating Desertification said:

Severe desertification is like cancer in a human being… . When the land loses its vegetation cover, it’s very hard to get it back. You have to deal with it meter by meter.

Sandstorms are just one of the massive problems that Iraq faces. According to the LATimes report:

The effects extend far beyond the immediate inconveniences of dust storms. Drinking water is scarce in many areas of the south as seawater leaches into the depleted rivers. The fabled marshes of southern Iraq, drained by Saddam Hussein and then re-flooded after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, are drying up, and the traditional Marsh Arabs who depend on them for their livelihood are being forced to leave again.

Now, Iraq faces a very certain future with most of its fragile ecosystem dramatically collapsing, almost on a daily basis.

Iraqis cover their faces during one of Baghdad’s increasingly frequent dust storms. Officials say decades of war and mismanagement, compounded by two years of drought, are wreaking havoc on the ecosystem. Photo Karim Kadim/Associated Press. Caption LATimes. Image may be subject to copyright.

Vanishing Marshes of Mesopotamia

Landsat satellite imagery reveals that in the last 10 years, wetlands that once covered as much as 20,000 square km (7,725 square miles) in parts of Iraq and Iran have been reduced to about 15 percent of their original size. Through the damming and siphoning off of waters from the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, the ecosystem has been decimated and, as a result, a number of plant and animal species face possible extinction.

The top image is a false-color composite made from data collected by the Multi-Spectral Scanner (MSS) aboard Landsat from 1973-76. Four Landsat scenes were stitched together to make an image of the whole region. In this scene, dense marsh vegetation (mainly phragmites, or marsh grass) appears as dark red patches. The elongated red patches along the banks of the Shatt-al-Arab River are Date Palm groves. The Shatt-al-Arab begins where the Tigris and Euphrates meet and carries their waters southeastward into the Persian Gulf.

The middle image (not shown above; click to see the full resolution) shows the state of the marshlands on September 7, 1990, shortly after the Iran-Iraq war. This image was acquired by the MSS aboard Landsat 5. The scene reveals that a large eastern swath of the Central and Al Hammar Marshes as well as the northwestern and southern fringes of the Al Hawizeh Marsh (the large red areas immediately above and below the Euphrates River, running west to east toward the bottom of this scene) had dried out as a result of causeways constructed to ease military transport in otherwise difficult terrain.

The bottom image is a false-color composite of data from the Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+), acquired on March 26 and May 4, 2000. In this scene, most of the Central Marshes appear as olive to greyish-brown patches indicating low vegetation cover on moist to dry ground. The very light to grey patches are areas of exposed ground with no vegetation, which may actually be salt flats where before there were lakes. The Al Hawizeh Marsh (straddling the Iran-Iraq border just east of the Tigris River) appears to be all that remains of the region’s natural wetlands, and it has been reduced in size by about half.

Today, river flow into the Mesopotamian marshlands has been cut by 20-50 percent, and the spring floods that sustained the marshlands have been eliminated. The end result is what was once a lush wetland environment roughly the size of the state of New Jersey has been reduced by about 85 percent in area to roughly the size of the small island nation of the Bahamas. What was once a vast, interconnected mosaic of densely-vegetated marshlands and lakes, teeming with life, is now mostly lifeless desert and salt-encrusted lakebeds and riverbeds.

Even for the 1,270 square km (490 square miles) of marshlands that still remain, quality of life has been adversely impacted by a decline in water quality. Human irrigation practices render the Tigris and Euphrates waters saltier than they originally were. And, with the boom in agriculture, there have been dramatic increases in the levels of chemicals as well as a rise in urban and industrial effluents in the rivers. Conversely, most of the load of natural sediments and silts the rivers used to carry now remains trapped behind multiple dams. Lower levels of silt decrease plankton and levels of organic carbon in the water which, in turn, adversely affect fish populations as well as soil fertility along the riverbanks and in the marshlands.

All of these negative trends point to the inevitable demise of the Mesopotamian marshland ecosystem within 2-3 years unless steps are taken soon to reverse the damage being done. Regarded by historians as one of the cradles of civilization, the Mesopotamian Fertile Crescent has supported Marsh Arab society for millennia. The culture of the half million or so Marsh Arabs living in the region is rooted in the dawn of human history, dating back to ancient Sumeria about 5,000 years ago.

This caption was based upon a study conducted by United Nation Environment Programme’s Division of Early Warning and Assessment. Click to access the entire UNEP report (in PDF format), entitled The Mesopotamian Marshlands: Demise of an Ecosystem.

Images courtesy Hassan Partow, UNEP; animation by Lori Perkins, NASA GSFC Science Visualization Studio, based on data from the Landsat 7 science team and the USGS EROS Data Center. Original caption. Source: Earth Observatory/NASA.

Related Links:

• Mesopotamia Marshes [NASA/EO]
• Iraq marshes’ recovery ‘in doubt.’ BBC Website
• Restoring the Garden of Eden: An Ecological Assessment of the Marshes of Iraq (pdf). BioScience, 56(6), 477-489.
• Daily Images of Iraq
• Vanishing Marshes of Mesopotamia (Landsat)
• Iraq in throes of environmental catastrophe, experts say [LATimes report]

EDRO  Links

• First Wave of World’s Collapsing Cities
• Future Scenarios
• Nuking Earth for Lifestyle

• The Fate of Energy Dinosaurs
• Energy: 286W
• Failing Ecosystems

• Image of the Day: Sandstorm in Saudi Desert

• Drought and Deluge

• CO2e Links Page
• World CO2 Emissions
• Carbon Footprint of Your Dollar
• New York Cognitive Dissonance

• World Problems: The Root Cause Matrix
• Giga Trends

• Look me straight in the eye & tell me you can’t
• Protect Economy from Climate??!
• Blind scientists examining the economic elephant

• How Much Carbon Dioxide Does Your Money Make?
• Cosmic Scale Evil
• Index of Human Impact on Nature

• The Billionaires’ contribution to CO2 pollution
• Stop Burning Earth

Bury your car, before it buries YOU!

First the car takes your food, then it buries you!

Original entry: Car burial day in S. Korea

“Human induced climate change is wreaking havoc across the globe. Extreme rain events and incidents of flooding, landslides … are increasing both in frequency and severity, burying building, cars, humans and everything else in their paths.”

Flooding in Busan South Korea July 16, 2009. Photo: AFP. Image may be subject to copyright.

Related Links:

• Drought and Deluge
• Landslides, Floods, Extreme Rain Events

• CO2e Links Page
• World CO2 Emissions
• Carbon Footprint of Your Dollar
• New York Cognitive Dissonance

Nascent Characteristics of the Cosmos

How Do You Fit into the Cosmic Scheme of Things?

1. The Cosmos is ethical.

2. The Cosmic Elements are altruistic.

The Cosmos Supports Life

Star Formation in Henize 206

Within the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a nearby and irregularly-shaped galaxy seen in the Southern Hemisphere, lies a star-forming region heavily obscured by interstellar dust. NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has used its infrared eyes to poke through the cosmic veil to reveal a striking nebula where the entire lifecycle of stars is seen in splendid detail.

The LMC is a small satellite galaxy gravitationally bound to our own Milky Way. Yet the gravitational effects are tearing the companion to shreds in a long-playing drama of ‘intergalactic cannibalism.’ These disruptions lead to a recurring cycle of star birth and star death. (Source)

Image Details

Object Name: Henize 206
Object Type: Star formation region in an emission nebula
Position (J2000): RA: 05h31m15.2s Dec: -71d03m58s
Distance: 163,000 light-years (50 kiloparsecs)
Constellation: Dorado (the Dolphinfish)

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/V. Gorjian (JPL)

The Structure of Cosmos is Altruistic

Spiral galaxy M51 [“Whirlpool Galaxy”]

NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has captured these infrared images of the “Whirlpool Galaxy,” revealing strange structures bridging the gaps between the dust-rich spiral arms, and tracing the dust, gas and stellar populations in both the bright spiral galaxy and its companion.  (Source)

Image Details

Object Name: Messier 51
Object Type: Galaxy Pair
Position (J2000): RA: 13h29m55.7s Dec: +47d13m53s
Distance: 37,000,000 light-years or 11 Mpc
Magnitude: 8.4
Constellation: Canes Venatici

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Kennicutt (Univ. of Arizona)

The Collapse Engine Revving UP!

The problems?

• Water scarcity. About 3 billion people are affected by water scarcity caused by diminishing reserves of freshwater (excessive use), climate change (drought, extreme climatic events, vanishing snow caps…)
• Excessive volumes of wastewater produced by growing urban population
• Increased demand for crops to feed growing urban population

The “Quick Fix!”

Irrigating urban agricultural land with untreated wastewater!

A possible outcome:

Spread of pandemic diseases leading to large scale collapse

A new 53-city study conducted by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) reveals that about 80 percent of the cities studied use untreated or partially diluted wastewater for agriculture. At least 50 percent of the urban agricultural land in those cities is irrigated with raw or diluted wastewater.

“Irrigating with wastewater isn’t a rare practice limited to a few of the poorest countries. It’s a widespread phenomenon, occurring on 20 million hectares across the developing world, especially in Asian countries, like China, India and Vietnam, but also around nearly every city of sub-Saharan Africa and in many Latin American cities as well,” said IWMI researcher Liqa Raschid-Sally.

“It’s a widespread phenomenon, occurring on 20 million hectares (50 million acres) across the developing world, especially in Asian countries, like China, India and Vietnam, but also around nearly every city of sub-Saharan Africa and in many Latin American cities as well.”

Wastewater is most commonly used to produce vegetables and cereals, especially rice, pose a health threat to the farmers as well as the consumers.

“The negative and positive implications of wastewater agriculture have only recently received attention. This study offers the first comprehensive, cross-country analysis of the conditions that account for the practice and the difficult tradeoffs that arise from it,” said Colin Chartres, director general of IWMI.

About 200,000 people in Accra, 10 percent of the urban population of Ghana’s capital city, consume vegetables produced on just 100 hectares of urban agricultural land, which is irrigated with wastewater, according to the IWMI report. “That gives you an idea of the large potential of wastewater agriculture for both helping and hurting great numbers of urban consumers.” Raschid-Sally said.

“And it isn’t just affluent consumers of exotic vegetables whose welfare is at stake. Poor consumers of inexpensive street food also depend on urban agriculture.” She reported.

Related Links:

• www.iwmi.org
• Cgiar (!)

• IWMI: water for food, water for life – summary [PDF file 4Mb]
• Irrigation with polluted water or wastewater is widespread [PDF]
• HEALTH RISKS OF IRRIGATION WITH UNTREATED URBAN WASTEWATER IN THE SOUTHERN PUNJAB, PAKISTAN [PDF]