Fact File 003 - Rivers The Veins Of The World

So as I’ve just started a new job related to rivers this week’s fact file will focus on the aquatic world.

• Only 0.8% of the earth’s surface is covered with 0.01% of the Earth’s water, despite the size of freshwater ecosystems they still contain 100,000 different described species (6% of all those known). It is also believed that they is the potential for many more invertebrate species to yet be discovered and even many other vertebrates left to be ‘discovered’.

• Water debt is a serious problem, climate change is disrupting the world’s distribution of fresh water and it is believed that by 2050 4.8 billion people will be at risk due to water stress. To put this in a different way 45% of the total GDP in 2050 ($63 trillion) will be at risk due to the lack of water, that’s 1.5x the current global economy. This would be mainly because of the lack of crop production.

• In fact water is so important in densely populated areas that the water is likely to be abstracted from the river treated, used, cleaned and returned multiple times before it flows through its entire course. For instance water in the Thames which passes through London is commonly used multiple times and there have been proposals that in the future (2025 onward) it will pass through at least seven people due to high demands.

• Finally a fact not directly about rivers but one linked to them, and a fact which is very sad. A team of UK researches has been analysing satellite image of ice sheets and have recently concluded that 1 trillion tonnes of ice has been lost from Greenland’s ice sheet from 2011-14. This loss is believed to have been because of an increasing number of lakes (nearly 8000 more lakes from 2000-2013) forming on the surface of the ice sheets, due to increased temperatures, which effect the stability of the ice.

Thanks for reading!

I hope these fact have created some food for thought about why we need to protect all rivers globally not only for the natural world but for humanity as well.

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Check out this video from Olaf Obsommer