Tag Archives: rivers

Pollution, melting microbes, undamming rivers, risks for elders: 4 key climate issues

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From ancient microbes awakening in melting glaciers to toxic pollutants unleashed by floods, the dangers are no longer distant or theoretical. They are here, and they are growing.

The Frontiers Report 2025, released by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), highlights four critical areas where environmental degradation intersects with human vulnerability: legacy pollution, melting glacier microbes, undamming rivers and climate risks for an ageing population that is growing.

The report paints a vivid picture of how climate change is not only altering ecosystems but also exposing communities – especially the most vulnerable – to new and intensifying dangers. Some issues may be local or relatively small-scale issues today, but have the potential to become issues of regional or global concern if not addressed early, the report warned.

UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen said action must be taken “to protect people, nature and economies from threats that will only grow with each passing year”.

Here’s what’s at stake and why it matters to all of us:

UN Nepal/Narendra Shrestha

UN Secretary-General António Guterres visits the Annapurna base camp in Nepal in 2023. (file)

Melting glacier microbes

Climate scientists are saying many glaciers will not survive this century unless action is taking to slow the melting rate caused by climate change. That means those living downstream will face a tide of floods alongside threats posed by reactivated microbes in a warming cryosphere or frozen parts of the Earth.

Frozen in ice sheets, glaciers and permafrost are bacteria, fungi and viruses. While most are dead, some are dormant and some are active. As global temperatures hit record highs, these microorganisms will become more active in many ecosystems. Even if the melting can be slowed down by mitigating greenhouse gas emissions, efforts must assess and prepare for possible threats from potential pathogens.

Also crucial is documenting and preserving cryospheric microorganisms, which can shed light on the history of climate and evolution, help in finding therapies for diseases and develop innovative biotechnologies.

© UNICEF/Felipe Chic Jiménez

Indigenous communities in the Amazonía region in southern Colombia. (file)

Dismantling dams

In the Colombian Amazon, river water levels have dropped by up to 80 per cent, restricting access to drinking water and food supplies, leading to shuttering 130 schools, increasing children’s risk of recruitment, use and exploitation by non-State armed groups and resulting in increased respiratory infections, diarrhoeal diseases, malaria and acute malnutrition among youngsters under age five.

Part of what is making the problem worse in Colombia and other hot spots around the world are the plethora of dams operating at a time when climate change is triggering droughts around the world. Drought is keeping more than 420,000 children out of school in Brazil, Colombia and Peru alone, according to a report by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

As such, there is a growing need to remove dams and other barriers to rehabilitate river ecosystems, a process increasingly initiated by local communities, Indigenous Peoples, women and youth. Rivers and streams can recover remarkably once barriers are gone, but other stressors, from pollution to climate change, need to be addressed in parallel. Understanding the restoration outcomes of barrier removal is necessary not only to guide future removals, but also to inform decisions about existing and future barriers.

Elderly people suffer disproportionately from climate change consequences.

Climate risks for the elderly

Older people face increased risks during extreme weather and suffer more from ongoing environmental degradation. As the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) predicts ever more hot weather, the elderly are suffering disproportionately, as seen in rising numbers of deaths and illnesses amid recent heat waves around the world.

At the same time, the world’s ageing population is growing: the global share of people over 65 years old will rise from 10 per cent in 2024 to 16 per cent by 2050. Most of them will live in cities, where they will be exposed to extreme heat and air pollution and experience more frequent disasters.

Older people are already more at risk, so effective adaptation strategies will need to evolve to protect these older populations.

A family outside their flood damaged home in N’Djamena, Chad. (file)

Legacy pollutants

Flooding has crippled communities in all regions of the world as the number of extreme weather events climb. Among the hidden dangers are legacy pollutants that have been secreted into the ground over time and released as extreme rainfall and floods wash away sediments and debris.

The Pakistan floods of 2010, flooding in the Niger Delta in 2012 and Hurricane Harvey off the coast of Texas in 2017 are all examples when floodwaters stirred up sediments, releasing heavy metals and persistent organic pollutants.

Evaluating sediments to understand hazards, rethinking flood protection to lean on nature-based solutions and investments in natural remediation of contaminated sediments are all options to deal with this problem.

Read the full Frontiers Report here.

NASA-Cassini Probe: Image of Titan’s Tallest Mountain Measuring 10948 Ft Mesmerizes

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NASA’s Cassini probe mission has sent images of Saturn’s moon Titan showing some tallest mountains on its surface measuring more than 10,000 feet.

The mountainous ridges called the Mithrim Montes showed three series of mountain ridges and the top measured 10,948 feet in height. Most of these mountain ridges are located near the equator. The region is called Xanadu.

“It’s not only the highest point we’ve found so far on Titan, but we think it’s the highest point we’re likely to find,” said Stephen Wall of the Cassini radar team at NASA. Another observer of the Cassini radar team Jani Radebaugh said, “Titan’s extremes also tell us important things about forces affecting its evolution.”

The mountainous cliffs point at the evolution of a planet where forces have shoved the surface upward from underneath. Earth too has similar mountains and cliffs and the tallest mountain Everest is one such star example. The Himalaya and Andes Mountains still manifest such forces of nature underneath.

Cassini has found that Titan also has rain and rivers and some active tectonic forces causing quakes. Titan’s rotation, tidal forces from Saturn or cooling of the crust are some of its natural effects tied to this phenomenon.

Since its arrival in 2004, Cassini’s observations have changed whole dimension of saturn and its largest moon Titan. It has revealed that Titan’s surface is shaped by rivers and lakes of liquid ethane and methane, which forms clouds and causes occasional rains from the sky as water does on Earth. Winds sculpt vast regions of dark, hydrocarbon-rich dunes that girdle the moon’s equator and low latitudes, while volcanoes erupt spewing liquid water as the lava.

On its journey to Saturn, Cassini carried the European-built Huygens probe, which landed on Jan. 14, 2005, becoming humankind’s first landing on a body in the Outer Solar System when it parachuted through Titan’s murky skies. Currently, scientists are eager to get new data that could confirm the presence of a liquid ocean beneath the Titan’s surface.

Radar images do not present scenes as they would appear to human eyes but use radio waves beamed by the spacecraft that are reflected and scattered off of Titan’s surface in order to see through Titan’s opaque atmosphere. Bright regions indicate materials that are rough or that otherwise scatter the beam; dark regions indicate materials that are relatively smooth or that otherwise absorb radar waves. A side effect of this technique is the grainy pattern called “speckle” that typically is present in Cassini radar images.

This view was produced using a technique for handling noise in Cassini radar images, called despeckling, that produces clearer, easier-to-interpret views. Titan’s icy crust sits atop a deep ocean of liquid water that probably acts much like Earth’s upper mantle — the layer of hot, high-pressure rock below the crust that can slowly flow and deform over time.

This radar view was obtained on May 12, 2008 taken from a location at 2 degrees south latitude, 127 degrees west longitude. The incidence angle is about 34 degrees.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington.