Battleangel

Due to our own diligent efforts to tame nature, the world’s rivers are now facing disaster.

We have used our engineering skills to harness the Earth’s water systems. Now we are paying the price.

The UN’s triennial World Water Development Report, compiled for an international conference in Mexico City which opens on Thursday, 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 per cent of all the water that used to flow from the land to the sea. Reservoirs now cover almost 1 per cent of land surface.

“Humanity has embarked on a huge ecological engineering project with little or no preconception - or indeed full present knowledge - of the consequences. We have sought to redesign and impose a new order on natural planetary systems, built over aeons of time.”

Combined with overpopulation, global warming and pollution this makes for an ecological nightmare that we ourselves are not in any way immune from.