Water Quality Impacts

Climate change has various water quality impacts: drought and heat waves lead to warming waters and create algal blooms; more powerful storms and other extreme weather events lead to flooding. 

Algal blooms caused by heat waves can be extremely dangerous and potentially fatal, not only for wildlife but also for pets, livestock, and humans that have contact with the water. Water quality impacts include:

• Extremely dangerous toxins to organisms

• Dead zones in water (eutrophication)

• Increased costs for drinking water treatment

• Decreased production in industry that relies on clean water

More Powerful Storms and associated flooding can impact water quality by putting contaminants & debris in waterways, causing infrastructure damage to water and sewage treatment plants, causing electrical outages, causing leaks and overflows from industry, and damaging septic systems.

• Increased costs for drinking water treatment

• Increased cost of wastewater treatment

• Electrical outages for long periods of time can impact human/livestock consumption of water from the aquifer

Now that you know a bit more about this climate change-related problem....