Around the world briefs
By Associated Press
Water gushes through sand dunes after a rare rainfall in the Sahara desert
RABAT, Morocco | A rare deluge of rainfall left blue lagoons of water amid the palm trees and sand dunes of the Sahara desert, nourishing some of its driest regions with more water than they had seen in decades.
Southeastern Morocco’s desert is among the most arid places in the world and rarely experiences rain in late summer.
The Moroccan government said two days of rainfall in September exceeded yearly averages in several areas that see less than 10 inches annually, including Tata, one of the areas hit hardest. In Tagounite, a village about 280 miles south of the capital, Rabat, more than 3.9 inches was recorded in a 24-hour period.
The storms left striking images of water gushing through the Saharan sands amid castles and desert flora. NASA satellites showed water rushing in to fill Lake Iriqui, a famous lake bed between Zagora and Tata that had been dry for 50 years.
In desert communities frequented by tourists, 4x4s motored through the puddles and residents surveyed the scene in awe.
“It’s been 30 to 50 years since we’ve had this much rain in such a short space of time,” said Houssine Youabeb of Morocco’s General Directorate of Meteorology.
Such rains, which meteorologists are calling an extratropical storm, may change the course of the region’s weather in months and years to come as the air retains more moisture, causing more evaporation and drawing more storms, Youabeb said.
Six consecutive years of drought have posed challenges for much of Morocco, forcing farmers to leave fields fallow and cities and villages to ration water.
The bounty of rainfall will likely help refill the large groundwater aquifers beneath the desert that are relied upon to supply water in desert communities. The region’s dammed reservoirs reported refilling at record rates throughout September. However, it’s unclear how far September’s rains will go toward alleviating drought.
Water gushing through the sands and oases left more than 20 dead in Morocco and Algeria and damaged farmers’ harvests, forcing the government to allocate emergency relief funds, including in some areas affected by last year’s earthquake.
The world’s rivers faced the driest year in three decades in 2023
GENEVA | The U.N. weather agency is reporting that 2023 was the driest year in more than three decades for the world’s rivers, as the record-hot year underpinned a drying up of water flows and contributed to prolonged droughts in some places.
The World Meteorological Organization also says glaciers that feed rivers in many countries suffered the largest loss of mass in the last five decades, warning that ice melt can threaten long-term water security for millions of people globally.
“Water is the canary in the coalmine of climate change. We receive distress signals in the form of increasingly extreme rainfall, floods and droughts which wreak a heavy toll on lives, ecosystems and economies,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo, releasing the report on Monday.
She said rising temperatures had in part led the hydrological cycle to become “more erratic and unpredictable” in ways that can produce “either too much or too little water” through both droughts and floods.
The “State of Global Water Resources 2023” report covers rivers and also lakes, reservoirs, groundwater, soil moisture, terrestrial water storage, snow cover and glaciers, and the evaporation of water from land and plants.
The weather agency, citing figures from UN Water, says some 3.6 billion people face inadequate access to water for at least one month a year — and that figure is expected to rise to 5 billion by 2050. WMO says 70% of all the water that humans draw from the hydrological systems goes into agriculture.
The world faced the hottest year on record in 2023, and the summer of this year was also the hottest summer ever — raising warning signs for a possible new annual record in 2024.
“In the (last) 33 years of data, we had never such a large area around the world which was under such dry conditions,” said Stefan Uhlenbrook, director of hydrology, water and cryosphere at WMO.
The report said the southern United States, Central America and South American countries Argentina, Brazil, Peru and Uruguay faced widespread drought conditions and “the lowest water levels ever observed in Amazon and in Lake Titicaca,” on the border between Peru and Bolivia.
The Mississippi River basin also experienced record-low water levels, the report said. WMO said half of the world faced dry river flow conditions last year.
The data for 2024 isn’t in yet, but Uhlenbrook said the extremely hot summer is “very likely” to translate into low river flows this year, and “in many parts of the world, we expect more water scarcity.”
Low-water conditions have had an impact on river navigation in places like Brazil and a food crisis in Zimbabwe and other parts of southern Africa this year.
WMO called for improvements in data collection and sharing to help clear up the real picture for water resources and help countries and communities take action in response.
IAEA team samples seawater near Fukushima plant to ensure safe release of wastewater
TOKYO | A team of scientists from the International Atomic Energy Agency arrived in Fukushima on Monday as part of an annual monitoring and sampling mission to ensure safety of the discharge of treated radioactive wastewater into the sea, officials said.
Japan began discharging the wastewater from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in August 2023. The plant was damaged in the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, triggering meltdowns in its three reactors and large amounts of radioactive water to accumulate.
China protested and blocked imports of Japanese seafood, which has hit Japanese seafood exporters
The IAEA team will take samples from the plant, coastal waters and a fish market in nearby Iwaki city. It will also visit to a national laboratory near Tokyo and meet with Japanese officials.
In late September, Japan and China announced a deal that would ease China’s seafood ban and include Beijing in the monitoring of the wastewater discharges under the framework of the IAEA.
The latest IAEA mission, which included experts from China, is not related to the China-Japan deal, officials said.
Japan says the discharge meets international safety standards and is being monitored by the IAEA. Japan has criticized China over its seafood ban as unscientific and demanded an immediate end to the measure.
Fast-rising cholera cases across
war-torn Sudan alarm the UN
CAIRO | Cholera cases in war-torn Sudan increased by nearly 40% in less than two weeks, according to the latest figures, alarming the U.N. health officials, who long warned about the outbreak and the lack of proper response since it was reported in July.
Sudan’s health ministry said Monday that there were 21,288 cases across 11 of the 18 states during this period, including 626 deaths. This marks a significant increase from 15,577 cases and 506 deaths reported on September 26. The cases are primarily in the eastern states.
Most cases were reported in Kassala, where UNICEF is collaborating with the ministry and the World Health Organization (WHO) to carry out a second round of the oral cholera vaccination campaign that kicked off last month.
“There’s no doubt that the number of cases is increasing rather rapidly. We’re seeing a faster rate of spread than we did during the outbreak last year, so the number of cases is concerning,” Richard Brennan, the regional emergency director at WHO, told The Associated Press on Tuesday. “That’s why together with the Ministry of Health and partners like UNICEF, we’re redoubling our efforts here.”
Cholera was officially declared an outbreak on August 12 by the health ministry after a new wave of cases was reported starting July 22. The disease is especially spreading in areas devastated by recent heavy rainfalls and floods, especially in eastern Sudan which sheltered millions of people displaced by the conflict between the Sudanese military and the RSF.
Cholera is a highly contagious disease that causes diarrhea, leading to severe dehydration and could be fatal if not immediately treated, according to WHO. It’s transmitted through the ingestion of contaminated food or water.
UNICEF delivered 404,000 doses of the vaccine to Sudan on Sep. 9. More vaccination campaigns are expected to be rolled out in other affected states. On Saturday, a UNICEF-chartered plane carrying 1.4 million doses of oral cholera vaccines arrived in Sudan. The vaccination campaign aims to reach 1.81 million people in the most affected states: Kassala, River Nile, and Gedaref, UNICEF said in a statement.
Brennan said that it’s too early to determine the effectiveness of the vaccination campaign given that they are in initial phases, but health workers are expanding surveillance activities to detect more cases and there is a plan to roll out an additional 2.2 million doses in the coming weeks.
“Cholera vaccines in and of themselves are not a silver bullet for cholera. They’re a very useful tool, but we still need to continue with all the other disease control measures in terms of the disease surveillance, treatment of patients once they become sick, engaging communities, and very importantly, giving people access to adequate quantities of clean water and sanitation,” Brennan added.
The health system in Sudan is in “freefall” with 75% of health facilities in Khartoum non-functional, said Hanan Balkhy, WHO Regional Director for the Eastern Mediterranean, during a media briefing on Tuesday. She added that the situation in western Darfur states is worse.
The ongoing war between the Sudanese military and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), broke out in April 2023, in the capital Khartoum and later spread across the country, with Darfur being among the regions seeing intense fighting.
The U.N. estimated that 20,000 people have been killed and thousands injured since the conflict began. The war has also displaced over 10 million people, including 2.4 million who fled to neighboring countries and other nations.
—From AP reports
