The energy-efficient desalination system produces fresh water without chemical additives and transforms leftover salts into useful materials
Desalination is the process of generating freshwater from brackish or saltwater, usually through the process of reverse osmosis. While this can be a very useful tool in water shortages, it also has some pretty huge drawbacks--reverse osmosis requires a lot of energy, requires chemical treatment of the water, and produces concentrated brine as a waste product which can be harmful to aquatic ecosystems.
Researchers have recently discovered a new way to perform desalination using solar energy, which doesn't require chemical inputs and collects waste salt instead of producing brine. Concentrating the waste salt in a solid form instead of brine means that it can later be processed to extract valuable minerals like lithium.
Experts say climate crisis, corruption and lack or misuse of infrastructure among factors driving water conflicts
Water-related violence has almost doubled since 2022 and little is being done to understand and address the trend and prevent new and escalating risks, experts have said.
There were 419 incidents of water-related violence recorded in 2024, up from 235 in 2022, according to the Pacific Institute, a US-based thinktank.
The institute has compiled evidence of hundreds of years of water-related conflicts, including cases of water being a trigger for violence, a weapon of conflict or a casualty of conflict.
“We’re seeing more conflicts and they are multicausal,” said Dr Peter Gleick, a co-founder and senior fellow at the institute. “The climate crisis and extreme weather play a part but there are lots of other factors such as state failure and incompetent or corrupt governments, and lack of or misuse of infrastructure.”
Joanna Trevor, Oxfam’s water security lead, said the charity had also seen “an increase in localised conflicts over water due to climate change and water insecurity”.
Recent examples include tensions over an Indus River water-sharing treaty between India and Pakistan after a terrorist attack, Russia targeting hydropower dams in Ukraine, Israel destroying Gaza’s water systems, and protests over water supplies in South Africa.
“In Gaza, Israel systematically weaponised water,” Trevor said. “They deliberately targeted water systems and desalination plants and blocked repairs. Wastewater contaminated drinking water due to the destruction of sewage and storm water infrastructure, and people have been attacked while waiting or queueing for water.
“In east Africa and the Sahel, water is becoming increasingly insecure and people are moving into new areas to access water, which in itself can trigger competition and conflict with the host population.”
While the world watched in horror as refrigerator trailers collected the bodies of Covid-19 victims in New York City, the suffering of Native American people was almost invisible.
The Navajo Nation was enduring an infection rate 21 percent higher than New York during the same time period. And the White Mountain Apache tribe on the New Mexico-Arizona border was grappling with infection rates almost twice as high as the national average.
A key factor driving these staggering infection numbers, according to a new report, was the limited access to water that as many as half of the Native Americans on reservations face. As hard as people across the country found it to practice rigorous hand-washing and social distancing, it was even tougher for many members of the 30 tribes in the Colorado River Basin. Many lacked the clean water essential for sanitizing their homes and bodies to stop the spread of the coronavirus.
The new report, Universal Access to Clean Water for Tribes in the Colorado River Basin, brings attention to the challenges many Indigenous people in the region face at a time when talks are set to begin on managing drought and water shortages throughout the river basin. Developed by the Water & Tribes Initiative, a consortium of tribes, nonprofits and academics, the report said the coronavirus exposed the human cost of water insecurity for Native American nations in the West. It also outlined strategies to finally tackle the longstanding crisis that helped make Covid-19 so lethal in Indigenous communities.
Heather Tanana, a research professor with the University of Utah law school’s Stegner Center and a member of the Navajo Nation Bar, a Navajo and the report’s lead author, said most of the 2 million Americans without running water and basic indoor plumbing are Native American, making race the most common factor in water insecurity. Only one of every three Navajo Nation homes has running water. And on the Hopi Reservation in eastern Arizona, 75 percent of people rely on water that is contaminated with excessive levels of arsenic.
Conditions like these made it difficult for Indigenous people in the region to take the precautions necessary to avoid contracting Covid-19. Navajo living in traditional, one-room hogans, for instance, could not isolate themselves from those infected with the virus. And contamination from past uranium mining forced many Navajo to travel to community taps for untainted water, where they risked picking up the virus from their neighbors waiting in line to fill their own tanks.
Getting water from the grocery store was also difficult, even at times when there was no shortage of supplies on the shelves, the report noted. The Navajo Reservation is the size of West Virginia. But while that state has 162 grocery stores, the reservation has just 13, many of them long drives from rural homes.
Tanana said the water situation reflects how Native Americans are often invisible to other Americans, and even to the federal government. “The average American doesn’t really know anything about Indigenous history, about the federal policies involved with native people in this country,” she said.
Nearly 60 per cent of rivers now flow with either too much or too little water.
The world’s water cycle is becoming increasingly erratic, swinging between destructive floods and drought, according to a new report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
It details how shrinking glaciers, droughts, unbalanced river basins and severe floods in 2024 are a sign of how climate change is making water resources increasingly more unpredictable.
“Water sustains our societies, powers our economies and anchors our ecosystems,” WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo said in a press release.
“And yet the world’s water resources are under growing pressure and – at the same time – more extreme water-related hazards are having an increasing impact on lives and livelihoods.”
An increasingly erratic water cycle
For the third year in a row, every single glacier region reported a loss of ice. In total, glaciers worldwide lost 450 gigatonnes of ice. That is the equivalent of a huge block of ice 7 kilometres tall, 7 kilometres wide and 7 kilometres deep or enough water to fill 180 million Olympic swimming pools.
This meltwater adds around 1.2 millimetres to global sea level rise in a single year, contributing to flooding risk for hundreds of millions of people living in coastal zones.
In many small-glacier regions, meltwater has already peaked or will peak soon. This is called the peak water point, after which annual runoff from melting decreases as the glacier shrinks.
Two-thirds of the world’s river basins saw abnormal conditions. The Amazon Basin and other parts of Africa were gripped by severe drought in 2024. In central, western and eastern Africa, alongside parts of Asia and Central Europe, conditions were wetter than normal.
After generations of herding and harvesting in the mountains, villagers in Samjung have been forced to relocate as snow fails, rains flood,
…rains flood, and water sources disappear.
The Himalayan village of Samjung did not die in a day.
Perched in a wind-carved valley in Nepal's Upper Mustang sits more than 3,962 meters above sea level.
The Buddhist village lived by slow, deliberate rhythms — herding yaks and sheep and harvesting barley under sheer ochre cliffs honeycombed with “sky caves”, 2,000-year-old chambers used for ancestral burials, meditation and shelter.
Then the water dried up. Snow-capped mountains turned brown and barren as, year after year, snowfall declined. Springs and canals vanished and when it did rain, the water came all at once, flooding fields and melting away the mud homes.
Families left one by one, leaving the skeletal remains of a community transformed by climate change: crumbling mud homes, cracked terraces and unkempt shrines.
In South Africa, as taps run dry in Johannesburg, Africa's richest city, a tone deaf remark by a senior politician there unleashes fury.
There's a water crisis in South Africa's economic hub, Johannesburg, where taps in some areas have been dry for weeks and protests have broken out.
The problems stem from years of municipal neglect, corruption, and well-documented mismanagement, resulting in poorly maintained and broken infrastructure.
Some Johannesburg residents haven't had a drop of water for more than three weeks straight: forced to travel to get water from municipal tankers and washing with buckets. Schools and hospitals are also affected.
In a press conference on the crisis last week, the province's top official, premier Panyaza Lesufi, told residents that Johannesburg's politicians felt their pain.
"People think that when there is no water, we and our families, we have special water, we don't. We also go through the same…suffer the same pain," he said.
Unfortunately, he didn't stop there.
"In some instances, I had to go to a certain hotel so that I could bathe and go to my commitments," he added.
Cue outrage. Commentators and cartoonists were quick to compare Lesufi's remarks to Marie Antoinette's apocryphal "let them eat cake" comments.
