Pollution poses big risks to global clean water supplies
Nitrogen pollution could intensify global water scarcity threefold by 2050, scientists warn in a recently published paper. In addition, “newly emerging pollutants,” such as microplastics, heavy metals, pathogens and pharmaceuticals, emitted into waterways could cause “severe water degradation in the future.”
Modeling the escalating impact of nitrogen pollution on water quality, the scientists found that more than 3,000 river basins globally are at risk of water scarcity by 2050 in one future scenario. That finding comes along with concern that climate change could exacerbate water quality decline and increased scarcity.
Nitrogen pollution and water contamination by heavy metals and pathogens have serious known public health consequences, while health impacts from microplastics and pharmaceuticals need far more research.
The researchers suggest solutions that include curbing nitrogen pollution through better fertilizer management practices and improved wastewater treatment.
Scientists say that nitrogen pollution from agriculture and human waste could dramatically worsen clean water scarcity by 2050, according to a groundbreaking study recently published in the journal Nature Communications.
Researchers from Germany and the Netherlands modeled the impact of nitrogen pollution on water quality in more than 10,000 river basins planetwide. They found that as of 2010, there were just 984 river basins thought to be facing water scarcity based on “classic” water quantity estimates. But factoring in the impact of nitrogen pollution saw this figure jump to more than 2,500 basins that year.
Projecting forward to 2050, a worst-case pollution scenario found more than 3,000 river subbasins facing clean water scarcity, covering an additional 40 million square kilometers (around 15.4 million square miles) of basin area and potentially impacting 3 billion more people than their estimate of 2.9 billion people impacted by water quantity scarcity alone in 2010, the researchers stated.
Using this pollution-inclusive scenario, the study identified nitrogen pollution hotspots in China, India, Europe, North America and Africa.
The wide divergence between estimates is attributable to the fact that water scarcity assessments often only track the quantity of water coming down a river, says Benjamin Bodirsky, study co-author and senior scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “What we added to this [analysis] is clean water scarcity. We were looking at which rivers have sufficient water quality to support biodiversity and ecosystem functioning.”
“Water pollution is becoming a very important cause of water scarcity,” notes Mengru Wang, lead author of the paper and a research associate at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. “You may have enough water, but if the quality is poor, then it cannot be safely used by humans or nature.”
Recent research indicates that nitrogen pollution could significantly impact water scarcity in river basins across the globe due to effects such as harmful algae blooms, resulting in the release of toxins and eutrophication, potentially causing fish kills and sickening people. Exposure to high levels of blue-green algae and their toxins, for example, can cause diarrhea, nausea or vomiting; skin, eye or throat irritation; and allergic reactions or breathing difficulties. Image by F. lamiot via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5).
Implications for planetary health
Nitrogen is released into the environment via human waste and by fertilizers spread on agricultural lands. A boom in synthetic nitrogen fertilizer production (now heavily sourced from fossil fuels) began with the invention of the Haber-Bosch process in 1913. Though that industrial process phenomenally boosted crop yields, feeding much of the world, it also allowed for a massive influx of nitrogen into waterways, leading to toxic algae blooms, hypoxia, fish kills and fishery collapse and human health impacts.
The disruption of Earth’s natural nitrogen cycle by human activity is counted among the nine planetary boundaries — limits that when transgressed threaten the “safe operating space of the Earth system.” The nitrogen planetary boundary was transgressed in 1970. Since then, activation has increased 160%, though notable differences have been observed between countries and watersheds depending on intensity of fertilizer use.
In the future, nitrogen hotspot river basins identified by the study could be at much greater risk of eutrophication with potential consequences for the environment, economies and possibly even human health. Bodirsky states that such high levels of pollution could lower fish harvests, reduce water quality to the point that it is not suitable for recreation and “destabilize ecosystems more generally.”
Jan Semenza, a public health expert at Sweden’s Umeå University, who was not involved in the current study, calls the findings “pretty bad news. … It’s not just water quantity, it’s also quality that’s plummeting, and it’s devastating for not only human health but also for planetary health in general,” he says.
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