(Download) "Saving Earth's Rivers: The Preservation of Ecosystem Health Must Become an Explicit Goal of Water Development and Management." by Issues in Science and Technology ~ eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Saving Earth's Rivers: The Preservation of Ecosystem Health Must Become an Explicit Goal of Water Development and Management.
- Author : Issues in Science and Technology
- Release Date : January 22, 2004
- Genre: Engineering,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 197 KB
Description
The odds do not look good for the future of the planet's rivers. As populations and economies grow against a finite supply of water, many previously untapped rivers are being targeted for new dams and diversions, and already-developed rivers are coming under increased pressure. A number of major rivers, including the Colorado, the Indus, and the Yellow, are already so overtapped that they dry up before reaching the sea. Meanwhile, India is proposing to link all 37 of its major rivers in a massive water supply scheme, Spain plans to build 120 dams in the Ebro River basin, and China intends to transfer water from the Yangtze River north to the overstressed Yellow River basin. In the United States, a project has been proposed in Colorado in which a pipeline would capture Colorado River water at the state's western boundary and move it eastward across the Continental Divide to the growing metropolitan areas of the Colorado Front Range. These proposed projects will almost certainly add to the ledger of ecological damage already wrought on the planet's rivers. Dams and diversions now alter the timing and volume of river flows on a wide geographic scale. According to Carmen Revenga and colleagues at the World Resources Institute, dams, diversions, or other infrastructure have fragmented 60 percent of the 227 largest rivers. Most of the rivers of Europe, Japan, the United States, and other industrialized regions are now controlled more by humans than by nature. Rather than flowing to the rhythms of the hydrologic cycle, they are turned on and off like elaborate plumbing works.
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