20th August 2022: Hot Rivers, Dry Rivers, No Rivers?
We take a tour of rivers in crisis around the world. Why are rivers drying up? What's getting done? How do we go about it?
Covering this week and the rest of this year’s drought season in the northern hemisphere, we will cover rivers that are being affected by climate change. The resulting extreme weather events bring undesirable effects to the economy downstream.
We start our virtual tour to Italy 🇮🇹. The river Po is severely affected by droughts, affecting agriculture along the country’s longest river. The Guardian’s The Observer published insightful details on the river’s ecological transformation.
Dr. Ramona Magno is with the Drought Observatory at Italy’s National Research Council - Institute for BioEconomy. Her latest monitoring report documents effects and measurements.
We cross to the other side of the Cottian Alps towards the Swiss Alps which feeds the River Rhine. Germany 🇩🇪 uses the river for inland raw materials transportation.
Local German TV station, ZDF’s heute, an evening news program, reports the critical water level is driving up cost of transportation and worry among barge skippers.
Machine translation:
Barbara Hahlweg (Anchor): In this country, the dry summer leaves ever more obvious traces, lakes and rivers are shrinking and there is little left of the Rhine in many places. Tomorrow, the water level in Kaub near Koblenz will probably fall below the mark of 40 centimeters, and the trend will continue from the previous record of 25 centimeters in the drought year 2018. This also applies to the transport of raw materials. Although the fairway (shipping channel) is a hand's (about 10 cm) breadth deeper under water, a hand's breadth of water under the keel is not enough for many ships at its stern.
Anselm Stern (Reporter): The otherwise so mighty, purely drawn by the drought. Bingen, Rhineland-Palatinate, here the river has become a gravel bank in large parts. Far too little water, the waterway increasingly shallow, smaller and smaller freighters are on the move, but they have very little loaded.
Hans-Heinrich Witte (President Directorate-General for Waterways and Shipping): The shipping industry operates with a significantly reduced transport volume. Compared to normal water levels, we have reached half of the carrying capacity and cargo volume of the ships.
Anselm Stern (Reporter): Half the load or less is not possible. The Rhine is no longer deep enough, which means that extremely fewer chemicals, diesel, and coal are reaching the companies, and that now, when the demand for coal, for example, is increasing drastically because of Russia's war. This is already driving up prices and worries.
Uta Maria Pfeiffer (Federal Association of German Industry): If the situation gets even worse, transport prices will explode even further. At the moment, we already have higher prices due to the low water level, because the inland waterway vessels do not have to take on as much capacity and have to sail more frequently. We need more transports.
For example, gas stations will probably have to do without mineral oils that are delivered by inland waterway. And our companies, of course, will have to do without the raw materials they urgently need.
Anselm Stern (Reporter): The issue is particularly pressing now, here in Kaub, in the vicinity of Bingen. A crucial bottleneck on the Rhine, one of the most important waterways in Europe, is losing more and more of its power.
Barbara Hahlweg (Anchor): And Christel Haas is now standing in the riverbed of the Rhine near Bingen and that makes you wonder how large ships can still sail at all.
Christel Haas (Reporter): Well, normally the water would stand here approximately up to my head or higher, but now here are only pebbles. The ships sail anyway but of course, everyone looks spellbound on the water levels because each skipper must decide for himself whether he can still sail or not each day. And the lower the water levels, the fewer ships will probably be able to do so.
When asked if the shipments of could be shifted to road or rail, the industrial companies answer with a resounding no. Too much traffic, too many construction sites, too much delay on the railroads and a massive lack of trucks, drivers. Worries and fears and hopes for the Rhine thus continue.
A Bloomberg Green report shows a map and mentions, “Scientists expect Alpine ice cover to halve by 2050, with almost all glaciers disappearing by the end of this century.”
In the same article, they mention nuclear power plants in France 🇫🇷 had a problem with river waters getting too warm to use for cooling. The River Loire’s low water level forced reactors in four cities to operate at a reduced capacity.
Switching continents—we carry on to India’s rivers 🇮🇳. Major river basins and Brahmaputra, the longest in the country, “have been found to be severely distressed.” Effects of pollution are exacerbated by climate change.
An engineer from Northern India has “an ingenious idea to build artificial glaciers at lower altitudes using pipes, gravity and night temperatures could transform an arid landscape into an oasis.” (Published April 2017)
Northern neighbor China’s Yangtze river 🇨🇳 is affected by a prolonged drought. The longest river in China generates 20% of the country’s GDP. Among affected are hydroelectric generators and agriculture. Factories have shut down—of note, Toyota and CATL which manufactures some batteries for Tesla suspended operations.
Finally, back to the United States 🇺🇸 for a follow up to our discussion back in June. Arizona, Nevada and Mexico 🇲🇽 face water cuts by the Bureau of Reclamation (USBR) due to a “tier 2” or “Level 2a Shortage Condition”. The reductions will be put into effect in 2023.
The USBR has published in their website the full text of the announcement.
Ben Tristem from Tech News shared a system diagram from the notes of the Clubhouse room he led earlier this week.
Here’s a Canva template if you would like to use the climate stripes as a “frame” of your profile photo to help open up conversations about the climate crisis.
Ten weeks left before COP27. We’ll play a track from a playlist dedicated to climate change awareness. This weekend’s pick is “Sky Cries”, a remix by PACMAN feat. The Exper-T & Wild Cristopher.
Listen to the replay of the discussion and other comments. Look Up! This Is Our World is an audio chatroom discussing curated news stories related to the climate and the environment. Our doors are open every weekend on Clubhouse. The app is free to use and everyone is invited to participate or listen in.
Cover photo by Dan Bridge.