Lake Urmia risks fully drying up: Iran wetlands chief

Iran's Lake Urmia will dry out completely if rescue efforts are not prioritised over the needs of farmers in the drought gripping the region, an environment official said Tuesday.

The warning comes just four years after a Japanese government-funded programme had raised hopes of stabilising what was once the Middle East's largest lake and turning around one of the worst ecological disasters of recent decades.

"If the water quotas are not delivered and the approved plans are not fully realised, the lake will definitely dry up and there will be no hope of its recovery," said the head of the environment department's wetlands unit, Arezoo Ashrafizadeh.

"According to the law, the energy ministry is obliged to provide the environmental water needs of Lake Urmia," she told Iran's ISNA news agency.

"But the lake has not received its water entitlement due to a decrease in rainfall among other reasons."

Ashrafizadeh said there needed to be a halt to all new dam construction and measures to "stop agricultural activities" if the lake is to be restored.

Situated in the mountains of northwestern Iran not far from the Turkish border, Lake Urmia is designated as a site of international importance under the United Nations Convention on Wetlands that was signed in the Iranian city of Ramsar in 1971.

The lake has no outlet to the sea and its former size was the result of the volume of water flowing into it matching or exceeding the volume being removed by humans or evaporating off.

The lake once covered 5,000 square kilometres (1,930 square miles). Since 1995, it has been shrinking, according to the UN Environment Programme, due to a combination of rising temperatures, reduced rainfall, dam-building and over-farming.

The drying out has threatened the habitats of shrimp, flamingos, deers and wild sheep and caused salt storms that pollute nearby cities and farms.

Ashrafizadeh said the lake "has not yet completely dried up, but its northern and southern parts have been separated and about 1,000 square kilometres (386 square miles) of the lake remain."

In 2013, Iran and the UN Development Programme launched a campaign to save the lake with funding from the Japanese government.

The plan saw some success as in 2017, the lake expanded in size to reach 2,300 square kilometres (888 square miles) before starting to shrink again in the face of a protracted drought.

In mid-July, police arrested several people for "destroying public property and disturbing the security of the population" after they demonstrated against the drying up of the lake.

It was one of spate of demonstrations in Iran this year against the drying up of rivers and lakes in drought-affected areas of the centre and west.

A largely arid country, Iran suffers from chronic dry spells that are expected to worsen with climate change.

Mercury pollution makes ducks more likely to get bird flu: study
Paris (AFP) Sept 6, 2022 - Ducks contaminated by mercury pollution are significantly more likely to get bird flu, a study found Wednesday, pointing towards another way that human-driven changes to the natural world increase the risk of viruses spreading.

Bird flu rarely infects humans but persistent outbreaks in the US and UK among other countries have led to millions of poultry being culled so far this year.

Wild waterfowl such as ducks are believed to be superspreaders of the virus in part because they travel so far as they migrate, potentially infecting other birds along the way.

For the new study, scientists shot down nearly 750 wild ducks from 11 different species in California's San Francisco Bay, which is in a migratory path that stretches from Alaska to Patagonia.

They then tested the ducks for mercury contamination and whether they were infected with bird flu -- or had antibodies for the virus in their system.

The results, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, showed that ducks contaminated with mercury were up to 3.5 times more likely to have had bird flu at some point over the last year or so.

The study's lead author, Claire Teitelbaum, a quantitative ecologist at the USGS Eastern Ecological Science Center, said mercury contamination "can suppress the immune system, and that might make infection with anything -- including influenza -- more likely".

The San Francisco Bay is also a "significant hotspot for mercury contamination in North America... largely from historical gold mining, where mercury was part of that process," she told AFP.

The ducks however tested negative to the highly pathogenic H5N1 bird flu strain that has been detected in many parts of the world.

- More bird flu likely -

Teitelbaum said that bird flu outbreaks in the United States had slowed down during the summer "because many of the wild birds are up on their breeding grounds" farther north.

But "as they're starting to come back down, we're probably going to see a lot more activity", she warned.

The spread comes as researchers increasingly sound the alarm that climate change, deforestation, livestock farming and other human-induced factors raise the likelihood of viruses crossing over from animals to humans.

Teitelbaum said that "there are just so many ways in which humans have historically altered and are continuing to alter the natural environment."

How pollution and contamination affect the risk of diseases spreading is "just another link that we need to add in to our more holistic view of what's going on in the world," she said.

Daniel Becker, a biologist at the University of Oklahoma not involved in the research, hailed the "impressive" study.

"There is surprisingly little work looking at contaminant concentrations in wildlife and their relationship to infectious disease," especially for viruses that can cross over to humans like bird flu, he said.

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England's drought-hit summer 2022 joint hottest on record
London (AFP) Sept 1, 2022
England had its joint hottest summer on record this year, tied with 2018, the country's meteorological agency said Thursday as it unveiled provisional mean temperature statistics for the three-month period. The announcement comes with most of England and Wales gripped by drought after exceptionally high temperatures and several heatwaves alongside minimal rainfall, mirroring conditions seen across northwest Europe. England also smashed its all-time temperature record in July, when the mercury to ... read more