Skip to main content

Home/ Groups/ IB Geography Freshwater
Ian Gabrielson

The Mekong | The Economist - 1 views

  • The Mekong region is Asia’s rice bowl: in 20
  • support the world’s biggest inland fishery, accounting for a quarter of the global freshwater catch, feeding tens
  • millions of pe
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • 14 lower Mekong countries (Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam) produced more than 100m tonnes of rice, around 15% of the world’s total.
  • The region’s fertile soil depends on nutrient-rich sediment that the Mekong carries downriver, mainly during the rainy season from June to October;
  • The region boasts remarkable biodiversity; only the vast basins of the Congo and the Amazon compare to or surpass it
  • here are more than 20,000 types of plant and nearly 2,500 animal species; freshwater dolphins and giant catfish; spiders 30 centimetres across and, in a limestone cavern in Thailand, a day-glo pink, cyanide-secreting millipede
  • he human diversity is striking, too: Tibetan monks pray; Burmese traders buy and sell; Cambodian fishermen cast nets; Thai farmers reap; Vietnamese markets float. The history is as rich as the soil. The Bud
  • a smiled while resting at the northern Lao city of Luang Prabang. Angkor Wat on the Mekong-fed Tonle Sap lake was among the biggest cities of the preindustrial world. The Khmer empire that built it dominated South-East Asia for longer than there have been Europeans in the Americas.
  • s its currents are rechannelled down copper conduits to power far-off cities the river itself will be trapped behind a series of concrete walls. Its fisheries, agriculture and biodiversity will suffer; the lives lived on its banks will be reshaped with scant regard for the feelings of those who lead them
  • t least 86,000 have been built over the past six decades, providing 282 gigawatts (GW) of installed hydroelectric capacity by 2014
  • y 2020 it wants an astonishing 350GW of installed hydropower capacity; in the European Union that would be enough to meet about three-quarters of total electricity needs. The dam at Wunonglong, about 300 metres long and more than 100 metres high, will provide a smidgen less than one of those extra gigawatts. The other 13 are expected to add 15.1GW mor
  • Downriver countries intend to build another 11 large dams on the Mekong, with dozens more planned for its tributaries
  • he dams will change the quality of the water in the river and the rate at which it flows. Some of this change could be for the better. Dams can prevent flooding by regulating the flow of water downstream. But some Mekong riverbank agriculture would not welcome too steady a flow
  • Increasing water in the dry season would shrink riverbeds, leaving less space for crops—millions of Mekong-basin dwellers grow vegetables on riverbanks. Reducing water in the rainy season produces smaller floodplains with less sediment deposited in them, impoverishing the soil.
  • According to International Rivers, an environmental NGO, the full cascade of dams planned for the Lancang would trap nearly all of the sediment coming from China, cutting the water’s sediment load in half.
  • And the dams lower down could worsen the problem; the clear, “hungry” water that flows from them in spates will carry away existing sediment in riverbanks and riverbeds. Some of that will be deposited farther still downstream; some will wash uselessly out t
  •  
    Excellent set of articles about the situation in the Mekong
Gemma Archer

How To Avoid The Next Atlantis - YouTube - 0 views

  •  
    "Why Do Rivers Curve? MinuteEarth 2,181,692 views"
Richard Allaway

File:The Distributed Water Balance of the Nile Basin.ogg - Wikimedia Commons - 3 views

  •  
    [Submitted by Ali Bowers]
Matt Podbury

International Rivers: The State of the World's Rivers - 6 views

  •  
    Brilliant resource for freshwater and river management strategies.
Matt Podbury

The race to stop Las Vegas from running dry - Telegraph - 2 views

  •  
    Amid a brutal drought the reservoir that supplies 90 per cent of Las Vegas's water is fast disappearing and desperate attempts to save Sin City are under way
Matt Podbury

Is The Global Water Crisis Real? - Water Crisis Infographic - Facts & Infographic - 5 views

  •  
    Excellent infographic looking at freshwater issues and conflict around the world. 
Roger Groenink

Report on Renaissance Dam notes concerns for Egypt, Sudan - Al-Monitor: the Pulse of th... - 2 views

  •  
    According to the report - whose 48 pages are each signed by all 10 experts on the panel - the panel noted a number of general concerns about their assessment of the studies submitted by Ethiopia. Most of those studies were completed after the project started. Moreover, environmental and social studies have not been able to demonstrate the dam's impact on the downstream countries, Egypt and Sudan.
Matt Podbury

https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/327371/report-warns-that-water-... - 1 views

  •  
    Global Water Security - Conflict and Management
Ian Gabrielson

Water: All dried up | The Economist - 2 views

  •  
    "All dried up Northern China is running out of water, but the government's remedies are potentially disastrous"
Matt Podbury

Water in China: Desperate measures | The Economist - 2 views

  •  
    China has 20% of the world's population but only 7% of its fresh water
Timothy Swan

BBC - Future - Technology - How to water crops with a mobile phone - 1 views

  •  
    Farmers in LEDC's using mobile phone technology to aid them in irrigating their fields
1 - 20 of 360 Next › Last »
Showing 20 items per page