Five rivers in Asia serving over 870 million people are the most threatened in the world, as dams, water extraction and climate change all take their toll, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) said.

Five rivers in Asia serving over 870 million people are the most threatened in the world, as dams, water extraction and climate change all take their toll, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) said.

The Yangtze, Salween-Nu, Indus, Ganges and Mekong-Lancang rivers make half of the WWF’s “top ten” most threatened river basins, which “either already suffer most grievously under the weight of these threats or are bracing for the heaviest impacts,” the organization said.

Also on the list are the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo and La Plata in Latin America, the Danube in central Europe, the Nile-Lake Victoria in Africa and the Murray-Darling in Australia.

“Nearly everybody in the world lives in a river basin and everybody has a contribution to make,” to prevent further environmental damage, the director of WWF’s Global Freshwater Program Jamie Pittock told AFP.

The threats facing river basins are varied and interlinked, and require holistic policies rather than efforts that target just one aspect but can end up being counterproductive, he said.

For example, “as governments become concerned about climate change reducing water run-off, they build more dams to store more water, which then results in more water being extracted from rivers and so builds up more ecological problems,” Pittock said.

Many governments are also focusing on hydro-electric power plants as a “clean” source of energy, but this means more dams which stem water flows and kill off fish populations, he added.

The WWF report highlighted water extraction, dams, and climate change as the most wide-ranging threats that will have the most impact on people, though invasive species and pollution also pose serious problems.

This is particularly the case for China’s Yangtze river basin, where decades of heavy industrialization, damming, and huge influxes of sediment from land conversion have made it one of the world’s most polluted rivers, the WWF said.

Over-fishing is the main threat facing the Mekong, while dams and infrastructure projects imperil freshwater habitats in the Salween, La Plata and Danube basins, the report added. AFP