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.
A B.C. company testing deepsea mining in the Pacific Ocean says the release of discharge directly into the sea was an accident and was quickly resolved. On Wednesday, The Metals Company said that video footage showing fouled water going directly from the company’s mining ship into the ocean, which was released by Greenpeace, was a “minor and temporary event.”
Low water levels reveal dry, crusty banks of the Nile River. As one of the longest rivers in the world is threatened by both overuse and climate change, so is the water security of the millions of people who rely on it for daily use in Sudan and Egypt. As the host country of the COP27 climate conference, Egypt kept water security front and centre. Monday was "water day" at the summit, and desalination was a hot topic.
Desalination is seen as a path forward to ensuring coastal communities have a steady supply of clean drinking water as populations expand. Historically, desalination projects have struggled to scale widely, as the high amount of energy required to remove salt from ocean water creates costs and damages sustainability. A Quebec, Canada firm has developed a product to address the energy and environmental concerns of desalination by making a modular, floating buoy that harnesses the power of the sun and waves to turn ocean water into drinkable water. Oneka builds a self-contained, solar-topped device that also harnesses tidal power. The two energy sources allow the buoy to draw ocean water in through reverse osmosis, and then convert it to drinkable water.
