Smog Over Eastern China, September 2005
Source: NASA Earth Observatory
There are five great challenges that must be addressed in the near future if the world is to meet its water needs without war, famine, demographic collapse, and possible social collapse:
1) Climate Change
2) Population Growth
3) Increased Standards of Living
4) Water Management Institutions
5) Contamination
In some respects, contamination is the best known and studied of these challenges, for at least since the emergence of the environmentalist movement in the 1960s, individuals, institutions and governments have become aware of and sensitive to matters of contamination. In many nations large government departments like the Environmental Protection Agency in the US have been established in an attempt to halt further contamination of water bodies and, where possible (think Superfund in the US) to mitigate past contaminations. In the richer and longer developed nations of Europe and North America, those departments have had some success in both preventing additional contamination and cleaning-up at least parts of the worst cases of past contamination.
The recent rapid economic growth in China, with hugely increased demands for water because of industrial and agricultural uses, has pointed to the horrifying problem of contamination of its waters. The Friday 29 October 2010 issue of the right-wing Washington Post (WP), a paper where international coverage is normally non-existent or mediocre, contains an insightful article on the contamination of a large lake not far from Shanghai, Tai Lake. Near the mouth of the Yangtze, the lake is recipient of agricultural and human waste contaminants from upstream, with more contamination coming from areas near its shores resulting in an overload of contaminants, not least Nitrogen (N), in forms that promote the growth of algae. The lake is now nearly covered with toxic forms of the simple organisms making its waters foul smelling, largely useless for agricultural and industrial purposes, destructive of its fish once used for food, and generally making the water unsafe for human consumption. While I rarely recommend the WP as a useful information source, this article is worth a read.
