Almost Half of Europe’s Water Is Threatened by Pollution
▻http://www.citylab.com/work/2014/06/almost-half-of-europes-water-is-threatened-by-pollution/372797
Today, researchers from Germany, France and elsewhere released the results of what’s reportedly the broadest-ever analysis of organic chemicals ▻http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/06/11/1321082111 in European freshwater. Their findings are not heartening: They say they’ve gathered “strong evidence that chemicals threaten the ecological integrity and consequently the biodiversity of almost half of the water bodies on a continental scale.”
After sorting through government data from 4,001 monitoring sites, they found pollution levels high enough to kill aquatic species at 14 percent of the sites. Meanwhile, chemicals swirling in the water were prevalent enough to cause chronic health effects at 42 percent of the sites. These areas of intense pollution were most often found downstream of urban areas and agricultural installations.
Because of limitations in measuring the pollution – there are relatively few sampling sites in rivers in Scandinavian and Baltic countries, for instance – it’s likely these findings underestimate the true pollution risks, the researchers add.
