U.N. Disgust On Loop Forever

The UN's triennial World Water Development Report, warns that "we have hugely changed the natural order of rivers worldwide", mainly through giant dams and global warming. Some 45,000 big dams now block the world's rivers, trapping 15% the water that used to flow from the land to the sea. Reservoirs now cover almost 1% of land surface. The UN report says that demand for them "will continue to increase", but recommends that they should be barred from the world's remaining, undammed "free-flowing" rivers. The United States has dismantled 465 dams in recent years, mainly for environmental reasons. But last week, in an abrupt U-turn, it signalled that it was about to embark on its biggest dam-building campaign in decades, when the Washington State legislature passed a bill to allow the federal government to build a series of dams on the Columbia, the West's largest river. Global warming is endangering even the rivers that have largely escaped damming. The relatively untamed Amazon was hit by its most serious drought on record last autumn. And salmon are dying in Alaska's Yukon River, the world's longest undammed watercourse, because its waters are getting too hot.