Scientists say that nitrogen pollution from agriculture and human waste could dramatically worsen clean water scarcity by 2050, according to a groundbreaking study recently published in the journal Nature Communications. Researchers from Germany and the Netherlands modeled the impact of nitrogen pollution on water quality in more than 10,000 river basins planetwide. They found that as of 2010, there were just 984 river basins thought to be facing water scarcity based on “classic” water quantity estimates. But factoring in the impact of nitrogen pollution saw this figure jump to more than 2,500 basins that year. Projecting forward to 2050, a worst-case pollution scenario found more than 3,000 river subbasins facing clean water scarcity, covering an additional 40 million square kilometers (around 15.4 million square miles) of basin area and potentially impacting 3 billion more people than their estimate of 2.9 billion people impacted by water quantity scarcity alone in 2010, the researchers stated. Using this pollution-inclusive scenario, the study identified nitrogen pollution hotspots in China, India, Europe, North America and Africa. The wide divergence between estimates is attributable to the fact that water scarcity assessments often only track the quantity of water coming down a river, says Benjamin Bodirsky, study co-author and senior scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “What we added to this [analysis] is clean water scarcity. We were looking at which rivers have sufficient water quality to support biodiversity and ecosystem functioning.” “Water pollution is becoming a very important cause of water scarcity,” notes…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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