Protect Water
Water is the essential ingredient for life on earth. Plants need it to grow, animals need it to function. Without water everything dies.
Our oceans and our rivers are threatened by climate change in multiple ways.
Global warming is increasing ocean temperatures and increasing acidification. This heat and acid is killing ocean ecosystems, with loss of kelp forests, corals and reefs. This in turn, kills the fish and other sea creatures that rely on these systems for survival. These deaths keep threatening life further up the food chain to the point where its estimated that there will be no fish in the sea by 2050.
Sea ice and glaciers are melting, raising the sea level across the globe, sinking islands and eroding coast lines. In the Arctic Circle, methane once trapped beneath the ice is now being released adding to the greenhouse layer and further increasing temperatures. The loss of the ice sheet also means less heat is reflected back out to space, further warming the planet.
From The Canberra Times: Menindee “whipping boy” for Darling River 26/2/2019
Fresh water supplies are threatened by increased evaporation and reduced rainfall but also by storms and floods, which contaminate water supplies and erode top soil.
The water needs for ecosystem health and for human consumption must be placed above that of those of fossil fuel extraction. Oil drilling is too risky to bet against. Oil spills decimate ocean ecosystems and the communities that rely on those waters for their livelihood. Coal mining is water intensive as water is needed to wash the coal. Coal seam gas extraction contaminates and threatens water tables.
It is extreme folly to continue to threaten water by extracting fossil fuels.
It is also foolish to extract river water to the point where the river is no longer flowing and the ecosystem that relies on it dies. We are seeing this now in Australia with the over extraction of water for cotton and rice irrigation in the Murray-Darling basin.
From the Wilderness Society: Protecting the Bight from Big Oil. Showing the areas at risk from an oil spill in the Bight
Towns along the upper basin are having bottled drinking water trucked in, their needs subjugated below that of coal and cotton.
We must work to restore the Murray-Darling basin, to let the river flow. We must work to prevent oil drilling in the Bight and we must protect our groundwater from gas extraction practices that threaten it.
Individuals should be water wise and have water tanks. Councils should harvest storm water and use that to water trees, helping cool the urban landscape. Many councils and individuals do these things and they do help, but in the water big picture we need our government to protect the rights of humans to water, to restore river flows and to stop fossil fuel extraction.
REFERENCES
https://www.unwater.org/water-facts/climate-change/
https://theconversation.com/why-does-the-carmichael-coal-mine-need-to-use-so-much-water-75923