(Finance) – In the last 28 years they have been lost 22 gigatons of water per year more than half of the great lakes of the world as a result of global warming and consumption related to human activities. It is what was calculated in one study Published on Science by an international team led by Fangfang Yao of the University of Colorado at Boulder. The phenomenon almost puts you at risk 2 billion people residents near retreating reservoirs.
The study, starting from 250,000 satellite images taken between 1992 and 2020, showed thesuperficial extension of 1,972 of the largest lakes in the world (including 1,051 natural lakes and 921 artificial reservoirs). To these they then added the measurements of the water level obtained with nine satellite altimeters, in order to be able to calculate the volume of the lakes in recent decades. The results reveal a decrease in stored water in 53% of the world’s large lakes, located in both wet and dry areas, with larger-than-expected losses in Arctic and in humid tropical areas. A significant increase in water is recorded in only 24% of the large lakes, which however are mostly located in remote and sparsely populated regions such as the Tibetan plateau.
As for the progress of the storage of water in man-managed reservoirs, significant losses have been discovered in nearly two-thirds of large reservoirs, mainly due to sediment build-up.
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