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Theirs was one of many similar struggles that have unfolded in recent years across Central Texas, where protection of creeks and rivers from treated wastewater discharge often falls to shoestring community groups as an onslaught of population growth and development pushes ever deeper into the countryside. “All this would have been destroyed,” Denke said in April as she surveyed a spring-fed stretch of Commissioners Creek. “Raising the money to fight this is not easy. But you have to, you can’t let this just slide by.”Eventually, the camp owner, who did not respond to a request for comment from Inside Climate News, agreed in settlement negotiations not to discharge into the creek. Instead, they would spray their treated effluent over their own property—an increasingly popular means of wastewater disposal. In exchange, the neighbors would drop their opposition to the two-story dam the camp erected for a private lake and waterpark on little Commissioners Creek. “I’m trying to stay positive about it,” Denke said. “It was a huge win.” But the battle never ends amid the rapid pace of development in Texas. Several miles downstream, another subdivision developer wants to treat wastewater and discharge it into Hondo Creek. And in a neighboring watershed, another community group recently stopped another Christian youth camp from discharging into the Sabinal River.
Similar stories repeat throughout Central Texas, where two decades of booming population growth have come with a massive increase in domestic wastewater—mostly human sewage. The effluent from wastewater treatment plants appears clean and clear, but it contains high levels of organic nutrients that can cause algae blooms and devastate native aquatic ecosystems when dumped into streams and rivers. “Unfortunately, society at large has no idea,” said Jeff Back, a staff scientist at Baylor University who has studied nutrient pollution in Texas waterways for 20 years. “Developers want to continue to do their business, but they need to be responsible.”
Now, as the state Legislature meets for its biennial session, advocates for water protection are supporting a bill that would prohibit most new discharges of treated wastewater into the state’s last 21 stretches of pristine rivers and streams, as defined by measured nutrient levels. Filed by state Sen. Sarah Eckhardt, a Democrat from Austin, it’s the latest iteration of a bill that groups have tried repeatedly without success to pass in Texas. But the breathless pace of suburban sprawl in Texas leaves no time to pause and make systemic changes. Instead, Texas cities run pipelines to distant aquifers to meet the ever-growing needs of new neighborhoods that will use most of their drinking water on lawns while piping away their effluent for treatment and discharge into a creek. “We’re going to continue to rely on extraction instead of any regenerative kind of water systems,” said Venhuizen, 78, on a rocking chair in his backyard fitted with rainwater collection tanks and covered in native plants. “The madness has to stop.”
Dumping Into Rivers and Streams......Stephanie Morris bought a house on the South Fork San Gabriel River, 27 miles north of Austin, in 2013. She wouldn’t have done it if she knew what the beautiful river would become. .With adequate investment, plenty of solutions exist. Some could even be configured to make money that covers part of their costs. For example, some treatment systems that remove nitrogen and phosphorus from water do it by growing algae, which could be harvested and sold as fertilizer. To avoid the buildup of nutrients where effluent is sprayed onto land, grasses can be harvested and sold as hay. Irrigation of hay for livestock is the largest water demand driving shortages in parts of Texas and the West. Eventually, water scarcity will compel urban planners to make use of wastewater rather than dumping into rivers, said Brian Zabcik, advocacy director for the Save Barton Creek Association, which has pushed for discharge protections on Texas pristine streams through several successive legislative sessions......there's much more https://insideclimatenews.
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According to Carlin Thandi Ngandu, the community engagement coordinator for Mobility for Africa, 300 women across Zimbabwe are part of the program, with a goal of ensuring that 70% of the beneficiaries are women. In many parts of rural sub-Saharan Africa, women have long been excluded from mainstream economic activities such as operating public transportation. However, three-wheelers powered by green energy are reversing that trend, offering financial opportunities and a newfound sense of importance. “My husband now looks up to me to take care of a large chunk of expenses, including buying furniture and other assets,” Bhobho said at a market where she delivers crops for farmers in Wedza district, about 150 kilometers (nearly 100 miles) from Harare.Called “Hamba,” meaning “go” in Ndebele, the tricycles are powered by solar-charged lithium-ion batteries. Mobility for Africa, a local startup, piloted the project in 2019 by leasing the vehicles to groups of women for $15 a month. Today, individual women like Bhobho can own them through a lease-to-purchase program. “I used to depend on my husband for everything, even money for bread,” she said.
Bhobho now owns land, has opened a small grocery store, is paying off a car and has moved her children from an underfunded rural public school to a better-equipped private institution. She earns up to $300 a month, comparable to government workers like schoolteachers. Beyond material gains, she has gained self-esteem.......read on https://apnews.com/article/
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Global heating will push billions outside the ‘human climate niche’.World is on track for 2.7C and ‘phenomenal’ human suffering, scientists warn. Guardian Damian Carrington 22 May2023 Global heating will drive billions of people out of the “climate niche” in which humanity has flourished for millennia, a study has estimated, exposing them to unprecedented temperatures and extreme weather.
The world is on track for 2.7C of heating with current action plans and this would mean 2 billion people experiencing average annual temperatures above 29C by 2030, a level at which very few communities have lived in the past. Up to 1 billion people could choose to migrate to cooler places, the scientists said, although those areas remaining within the climate niche would still experience more frequent heatwaves and droughts. However, urgent action to lower carbon emissions and keep global temperature rise to 1.5C would cut the number of people pushed outside the climate niche by 80%, to 400 million.The analysis is the first of its kind and is able to treat every citizen equally, unlike previous economic assessments of the damage of the climate crisis, which have been skewed towards the rich. In countries with large populations and already warm climates most people will be pushed outside the human climate niche, with India and Nigeria facing the worst changes. India is already suffering from extreme heat waves, and a recent study found that more than a third of heat-related deaths in summer from 1991-2018 occurred as a direct result of human-caused global heating.
Prof Tim Lenton at the University of Exeter, UK, who led the new research, said: “The costs of global warming are often expressed in financial terms but our study highlights the phenomenal human cost of failing to tackle the climate emergency. “Economic estimates almost always value the rich more than the poor, because they have more assets to lose, and they tend to value those alive now over those living in the future. We’re considering all people as equal in this study.” Prof Chi Xu, at Nanjing University in China, and also part of the research team, said: “Such high temperatures [outside the niche] have been linked to issues including increased mortality, decreased labour productivity, decreased cognitive performance, impaired learning, adverse pregnancy outcomes, decreased crop yield, increased conflict and infectious disease spread.” Prof Marten Scheffer at Wageningen University, the Netherlands, and a senior author of the study, said those pushed outside the climate niche might consider migrating to cooler places: “Not just migration of tens of millions of people but it might be a billion or so.”
The idea of climate niches for wild animals and plants is well established but the new study, published in the journal Nature Sustainability, identified the climate conditions in which human societies have thrived. It found most people lived in places with mean annual temperatures spread around 13C or 25C. Conditions outside those are too hot, too cold or too dry and associated with higher death rates, lower food production and lower economic growth. “The climate niche describes where people flourish and have flourished for centuries, if not millennia in the past,” Lenton said. “When people are outside [the niche], they don’t flourish.”Scheffer said: “We were surprised how sharply limited humans have remained when it comes to their distribution relative to climate – this is a fundamental thing we’ve put our finger on.” ........read on https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/22/global-heating-human-climate-niche
The Climate Chasm Between the world’s Carbon-guzzling Rich and the Heat-vulnerable Poor is Enormous!
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But despite this population growth, they are also the regions that, on current trends, will contribute least to the emissions that drive the climate disaster. So extreme is inequality that the lowest-earning 50% of the world population – 4 billion people – account for as little as 12% of total emissions. And those at the very bottom of the pile barely register at all. Mali’s per capita C02 emissions are about one-seventy-fifth of those in the US. Even if the lowest-earning third of the global population – more than 2.6 billion people – were to raise themselves above the $3.2-a-day poverty line, it would increase total emissions by a mere 5% – that is, one-third of the emissions of the richest 1%.Half the world’s population, led by the top 10% of the income distribution – and, above all, by the global elite – drive a globe-spanning productive system that destabilises the environment for everyone. The worst effects are suffered by the poorest, and in the coming decades the impact will become progressively more extreme. And yet their poverty means they are virtually powerless to protect themselves. This is the triple inequality that defines the climate global equation: the disparity in responsibility for producing the problem; the disparity in experiencing the impacts of the climate crisis; and the disparity in the available resources for mitigation and adaptation.
This is the historic novelty of the current situation. As we run ever closer to the edge of the environmental envelope – the conditions within which our species can thrive – the development of the rich world systematically undercuts the conditions for survival of billions of people in the climate danger zone. They are not so much exploited or bypassed as victimised by the climactic effects of economic growth taking place elsewhere. This violent and indirect entanglement is new in its quality and scale......and yet we still do nothing- read on https://www.theguardian.com/environment/commentisfree/2023/nov/23/climate-emergency-crisis-conference-cop-28
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