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Stockholm Water Prize awarded to British professor

British professor Anthony John Allan was on Wednesday awarded the 2008 Stockholm Water Prize handed out each year in the field of water research, the Stockholm International Water Institute said.

Published: 19 March 2008 15:31 CET

Allan, a professor at King’s College London, was honoured for having introduced the concept of “virtual water” in 1993, a unit to measure how much water is necessary in the production and trade of food and consumer products, according to a statement.

For example, a cup of coffee requires 140 litres of water to grow, produce, package and ship the coffee beans.

Allan was awarded the prize for “his unique, pioneering and long lasting work in education and raising the awareness internationally of interdisciplinary relationships between agricultural production, water use, economies and political processes,” the nominating committee wrote.

“The improved understanding of trade and water management issues on local, regional and global scales are of the highest relevance for the successful and sustainable use of water resources,” it said.

Allan, 71, will receive a cheque worth $150,000 dollars and a glass sculpture, to be handed over at a ceremony in Stockholm attended by King Carl XVI Gustaf on August 21st.

Greenpeace sounds alarm over Spain's 'poisonous mega farms'

Pollution from hundreds of intensive pig farms played a major role in the collapse of Murcia Mar Menor saltwater lagoon. Photo: JOSEP LAGO / AFP

The number of farm animals raised in Spain has jumped by more than a third since 2015 to around 560 million in 2020, it said in the report entitled “Mega farms, poison for rural Spain”.

This “excessive and uncontrolled expansion of industrial animal farming” has had a “serious impact on water pollution from nitrates”, it said.

Three-quarters of Spain’s water tables have seen pollution from nitrates increase between 2016 and 2019, the report said citing Spanish government figures.

Nearly 29 percent of the country’s water tables had more than the amount of nitrate considered safe for drinking, according to a survey carried out by Greenpeace across Spain between April and September.

The environmental group said the government was not doing enough.

It pointed out that the amount of land deemed an “area vulnerable to nitrates” has risen to 12 million hectares in 2021, or 24 percent of Spain’s land mass, from around eight million hectares a decade ago, yet industrial farming has continued to grow.

“It is paradoxical to declare more and more areas vulnerable to nitrates”, but at the same time allow a “disproportionate rise” in the number of livestock on farms, Greenpeace said.

Pollution from hundreds of intensive pig farms played a major role in the collapse of one of Europe’s largest saltwater lagoons, the Mar Menor in Spain’s southeast, according to a media investigation published earlier this week.

Scientists blamed decades of nitrate-laden runoffs for triggering vast blooms of algae that had depleted the water of the lagoon of oxygen, leaving fish suffocating underwater.

Two environmental groups submitted a formal complaint in early October to the European Union over Spain’s failure to protect the lagoon.

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