Informal settlements are expanding, with a new occupation attempt every 11 days, and the threat to the rainforest is severe
Antonio Pinto’s makeshift home on the outskirts of Manaus is an open-air shack, one of dozens of similar dwellings of timber and tarpaulin scattered around the hills.
Around them is the evidence of the use of flame and iron: the hills are scorched and brown, littered with fallen logs and toppled, twisted trees.
Continue reading...More than 100 rivers and canals flow beneath Tokyo, but from the ground it’s hard to notice them. Why has the city turned its back on water?
Of the near-endless flow of people over the busy Shibuya scramble crossing every day, few realise that beneath their feet is something else flowing, unseen and unnoticed: the crossing of two ancient rivers, the Uda and the Onden.
Beneath all the concrete and neon, Tokyo is a city built on water. It is the reason the Japanese capital’s 37 million citizens are here at all. From fishing village to seat of political power, canny water management was a key driver of the city’s extraordinary growth.
Continue reading...The Greek capital entombed its major rivers in concrete during its car-centred postwar development. Now the most storied of them, Ilisos, could be set free
Photographs by Christian Sinibaldi
Walking through the densely built metropolis of Athens, few visitors or even locals realise the Greek capital was once crisscrossed by three major rivers, not to mention some 700 smaller streams that flowed into them.
The Kifisos, the Iridanos and the Ilisos were buried under concrete during the city’s postwar car-centred development, in what daily newspaper Kathimerini has labelled “a crime against the city”.
Continue reading...Largest global study finds the drugs in two-thirds of test sites in 72 countries
Hundreds of rivers around the world from the Thames to the Tigris are awash with dangerously high levels of antibiotics, the largest global study on the subject has found.
Antibiotic pollution is one of the key routes by which bacteria are able develop resistance to the life-saving medicines, rendering them ineffective for human use. “A lot of the resistance genes we see in human pathogens originated from environmental bacteria,” said Prof William Gaze, a microbial ecologist at the University of Exeter who studies antimicrobial resistance but was not involved in the study.
Continue reading...Contamination found across UK lakes and rivers, in US groundwater, along the Yantze river and Spanish coast, and harbouring dangerous bacteria in Singapore
Microplastic pollution spans the world, according to new studies showing contamination in the UK’s lake and rivers, in groundwater in the US and along the Yangtze river in China and the coast of Spain.
Related: Rivers of waste: Pakistan's recyclers go out on patrol – in pictures
Continue reading...The next 15 megacities #6: New facilities by the Sabarmati will provide Ahmedabad with much-needed public space, but at what cost?
As the sun dips below the horizon, young lovers make themselves more comfortable on benches overlooking the Sabarmati river. Walkers stroll along the concrete promenades, and mothers enjoy a moment of respite under newly planted saplings while their children play in the adjoining gardens.
Few Ahmedabad residents could have imagined this scene a couple of decades ago. Back then the Gujarati city’s tidal river banks were lined with slum housing – precariously constructed on land polluted by industrial effluent and untreated sewage, and home to some of the most marginalised communities in the city.
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