Human activity has caused more than half of world’s biggest lakes to drastically shrink in the past 30 years, as per an investigation released in Science. The implications could pose risks to economics, human health as well as the environment.
Researchers have found that, when combined a global decrease in storage of water is equivalent to the decline in storage of Lake Meads — the largest reservoir in the U.S.
Water usage for development and agriculture as well as human-caused climate change, are the primary causes for the decrease, especially for natural lakes claimed Fangfang Yao who was the study’s principal author. In reservoirs, sand and dirt built up behind dams have also contributed to decreasing levels of water.
The findings were astonishing The authors described the findings as shocking.
“Roughly 14 of population of the globe reside in an area that has dry lakes,” Yao said. “So the impact of this could be huge.”
The study looked at more than 2000 of the world’s largest reservoirs and lakes with three decades of satellite data along with climate modeling to determine the extent to which bodies of water have changed shape or size in the past, and also to determine what factors was the cause of the changes. For instance was a lake smaller due to increased evaporation in warmer temperatures, or due to the fact that it was diverted for agricultural purposes?
The research findings showed “significant decreases,” the research paper stated, covering 53 percent of the reservoirs and lakes studied by the researchers from Boulder, Colorado’s University of Colorado’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences.
The majority that decline of lakes in nature was caused by climate change caused by humans and excessive consumption. This is a result, Yao said, that will aid water managers in managing and safeguard threatened lakes across the globe.
“If you recognize that the water is declining and the cause is attributed to human activities, should we put more importance on conservation and increasing the efficiency of our water?” Yao said.
A climate change-driven megadrought and an ever-growing human thirst have continued to drain the two largest reservoirs in the U.S. — Lake Powell and Lake Mead, which the Colorado River feeds. Lake Chad, one of the world’s largest freshwater lakes that provides more than 40 million people with water, has decreased by about 90 percent in the past decade.
The United Nations regards access to safe drinking water as a all-inclusive human rights. But its own figures show roughly 2 billion individuals across the globe don’t have access to it, and around half people in the world experience severe water shortages every year at least.
“Uncertainties are rising,” said Richard Connor who is the editor-in-chief of the U.N. document on water released in the spring of this year during the press conference in the latter part of March which was where world leaders met to explore to develop better strategies for conserving the world’s precious freshwater. “If we don’t take action there’s a good chance of an international crisis.”
Copyright 2023 Copyright NPR. To learn more, go to https://www.npr.org. 9(MDEwMjQ0ODM1MDEzNDk4MTEzNjU3NTRhYg004))
