Kristen Villebrun and Wendy Bush hoped they wouldn't have to pray for Chedoke Creek, but four years after they first raised alarm about the water's condition, they were part of an Indigenous full moon ceremony to do just that. About 50 people showed up near Princess Point on the dark and frigid Monday evening for the monthly ceremony, which was particularly special as it focused on Chedoke Creek. The body of water that runs into Cootes Paradise had about 24 billion litres of sewage and storm water runoff leak into it due to a gate being left open.
Lately, business is up. Amid two decades of drought, cloud seeding — using airplanes or ground equipment to waft rain-and-snow-making particles into clouds — is on the rise in the Rockies. Colorado has added three new programs in the last five years. Wyoming, which began seeding in 2014, added an aerial program in 2018. Utah has steadily increased its fleet of cloud seeding equipment, and the state legislature just approved record funding to further expand programs and research.
Researchers out of Europe say global levels of man-made "forever chemicals" have made rainwater unsafe to drink around the world — even in the most remote areas. The study, published in peer-review journal Environmental Science and Technology on Tuesday from researchers at Stockholm University and ETH Zurich, argues that guideline values – amounts considered acceptable – for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in drinking water, surface water and soil have fallen "dramatically" over the last 20 years "due to new insights into their toxicity."
On LinkedIn, flypop CEO Nino Singh Judge posted that the twinjet conducted a mission to Iqaluit amid the crisis the Inuit and Nunavummiut communities are facing there. The problems revolve around housing and clean drinking water. The BBC reports that the area has not had clean water for a month. Notably, a state of emergency was declared on October 12th, and since then, it’s been noted that the water is not even safe after boiling.
Water quality sampling is an arduous task – exponentially so for remote areas, where difficulties in physical accessibility can lead to years- or decades-long gaps in data. This, in turn, leads to inefficiencies, delays and mistakes in remedying problems with water quality. Now, a team led by Penn State researchers has developed a new, AI-powered model to predict water quality in such remote regions using weather data.
Canada is famously home to 20 percent of the world’s freshwater — but how well are we stewarding this supply? WWF-Canada recently reassessed the health of our country’s 25 watersheds to better understand how they’re responding to threats from pollution, habitat loss and climate change. Our 2020 Watershed Reports found that 26 per cent of Canadas’s 167 sub-watersheds received a score of Good or Very Good, which is good or very good news! But what’s bad, or possibly very bad, is that nearly 60 per cent of these sub-watersheds received no score at all because they remain Data Deficient. In other words, we just don’t know. This lack of data is concerning as we need a complete picture to determine which areas need dedicated efforts to protect our freshwater ecosystems.
It is to our national shame that many First Nations communities still don’t have access to potable water. That we have known about the problem for decades and failed to address it is a stain on our national character — one that Justin Trudeau and his Liberals made a lot of hay about addressing during the 2015 election campaign. “A Canadian government led by me will address this as a top priority because it’s not right in a country like Canada. This has gone on for far too long,” Trudeau said at the time, pledging to end all boil-water advisories on reserves within five years.
