Europe boosts water preservation efforts

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Sustainable Switch

Climate Focus

By Sharon Kimathi, Energy and ESG Editor, Reuters Digital

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.

Climate Buzz

1. Southwest Pacific hit by unprecedented marine heat waves in 2024, UN says

Unprecedented heat waves in the Southwest Pacific affected more than 10% of the global ocean surface in 2024, damaging coral reefs and putting the region's last remaining tropical glacier at risk of extinction, the World Meteorological Organization said in an annual report.

A haze from Canadian wildfire smoke causes poor air quality in Duluth, Minnesota, U.S. REUTERS/Erica Dischino

2. Canadian wildfire smoke spreads across a third of US

Smoke from wildfires burning in three Canadian provinces covered about a third of the U.S. this week, forecasters said. The haze, which brought hazardous levels of particulate pollution to Minnesota a day earlier, stretched from the Dakotas through the Ohio Valley, into the Northeast, and as far south as Georgia, according to the National Weather Service's Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland.

3. Global energy investment set to hit record $3.3 trillion in 2025, IEA says

Clean energy technologies, including renewables, nuclear, and energy storage, are set to attract $2.2 trillion in investment, twice the amount expected for fossil fuels, the IEA said in its annual World Energy Investment report.

Solar power is expected to be the biggest beneficiary, with investment forecast to reach $450 billion in 2025, while spending on battery storage is predicted to surge to around $66 billion, the report said.

4. US Senate panel seeks to cut unspent US climate, clean energy funds

The Senate environment committee submitted a proposal this week aimed at cutting all unspent funds that were meant for climate and clean energy programs under former U.S. President Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act.

The panel released a budget reconciliation draft that would rescind all the unspent funds and create a fee that developers of energy projects like oil wells or pipelines can pay to accelerate environmental reviews.

5. Trump budget bill would kill subsidies that made home solar mainstream

In keeping with Trump's cuts to clean energy subsidies, a last-minute tweak to the Republican "big, beautiful bill" passed by Congress last month would immediately end subsidies for solar leasing companies that help make rooftop systems affordable to homeowners, likely leading to a massive drop in the pace of installations, according to industry representatives.

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

Reuters global energy transition columnist Gavin Maguire also sticks with Europe's water woes as the bloc's power generation mix looks set to get dirtier over the coming summer after an enduring dry spell depleted reservoirs and crimped hydroelectricity output. Click here for the full comment piece.
- Will Trump's latest efforts to curb U.S. petrochemical exports to China end up hurting the U.S. energy sector more than the Chinese economy? Click here to find out more from Reuters Energy Columnist Ron Bousso.
Click here for a column on the shipping industry's net-zero efforts by Ethical Corp Magazine's editor in chief Terry Slavin and contributor Catherine Early.

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.

Number of the Week

2,000 gallons

That is the amount of diesel that spilled across a waterfront in a popular tourist spot in Baltimore, Maryland this week. The spill originated from a Johns Hopkins Hospital facility near the marina and was initially estimated at only 100 gallons, the office of Maryland Governor Wes Moore said in a statement.

Sustainable Switch Climate Focus was edited by Tomasz Janowski.

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