Sustainable Switch Climate Focus: Europe boosts water preservation efforts
June 6 - This is an excerpt of the Sustainable Switch Climate Focus newsletter, where we make sense of companies and governments grappling with climate change on Fridays.
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Hello!
Happy World Environment Day!
Although this year's World Environment Day focuses on plastic pollution in our waters, today's focus touches on a wider issue – the preservation of water ecosystems.
This week, the European Investment Bank pledged to invest 15 billion euros ($17 billion) in projects that help reduce water pollution, prevent water wastage, and support innovative businesses in the water sector over the next three years.
The commitment by the European Union's lending arm is part of the bloc's strategy to tackle water shortages and droughts made worse by climate change, and address the intense pressure on water supplies from farming, pollution and sprawling urbanisation.
Meanwhile, Britain also said it would step up efforts to protect its water resources ahead of the summer, after the driest and warmest spring in England in over 130 years.
The Environment Agency (EA) said reservoirs across England were only 77% full, compared with the average 93% for this time of year. It noted, though, that recent rain at the start of June was having a positive effect.
"It's been the driest spring since 1893, and we need to be prepared for more summer droughts as our climate changes," the group's chair and the EA's director of water, Helen Wakeham, said.
Wakeham also said recent rainfall was helping, but that it hadn't been enough to prevent a drought being declared in the northwest of England.
Additionally, Britain banned Thames Water and five other water companies from paying bonuses to their bosses because they had failed to tackle pollution, in its latest effort to overhaul the industry's poor environmental record.
The government has said the water industry in England and Wales is broken, with Thames Water at the centre of a scandal after years of under-investment resulted in sewage spills, while it continued to make profits and pay executive bonuses.
Be sure to keep scrolling for a video in our 'What to Watch' section about plastic pollution in Brazil's Rio dos Bugres that ties in with the World Environment Day theme.
And also check out yesterday's Sustainable Switch, which highlighted a story about the scientists in Japan who have developed a plastic that dissolves in seawater within hours in the ESG Spotlight section. Click here to revisit that Reuters article.
What to Watch
Sticking with the World Environment Day theme of plastics, a new study has found that Brazil's Rio dos Bugres has one of the world's highest concentrations of microplastic pollution. Its findings are raising concerns among scientists and local fishermen. Click here for the full Reuters video.
CLIMATE COMMENTARY
CLIMATE LENS
The use of artificial intelligence is driving up global indirect emissions, according to a United Nations report.
Indirect carbon emissions from the operations of four of the leading AI-focused tech companies, Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta, rose on average by 150% from 2020-2023, as they had to use more power for energy-demanding data centres, a report by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the U.N. agency for digital technologies, said.
Today's Sustainable Switch was edited by Tomasz Janowski
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