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While many families in the U.S. were relaxing over the Memorial Day weekend, top negotiators for President Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., were working late into the night to finalize the details of a measure that, if passed, would avoid a historic government default and raise the nation’s debt ceiling.

McCarthy released the outcome of those efforts, 99 pages of legislative text, on Sunday evening, giving House lawmakers 72 hours to review the bill before a planned vote in that chamber.

Both Biden and McCarthy say the bill includes necessary trade-offs.

“The agreement prevents the worst possible crisis: a default for the first time in our nation’s history, an economic recession, retirement accounts devastated, millions of jobs lost,” Biden told reporters Sunday evening, arguing that the compromise preserves a series of Democratic priorities.

The bill would hold non-defense spending for fiscal year 2024 at roughly current levels and raise it by 1% in 2025. The agreement separately suspends the debt limit for nearly two years until Jan. 1, 2025.

Its completion follows weeks of negotiations as the government crept toward the date when it would run out of money to pay its bills.

“When you sit and negotiate within two parties, you got to deal with both sides of the aisle,” McCarthy told reporters on Sunday. “So it’s not 100% of what everybody wants.”

Even as McCarthy and Biden praise the bill as a framework that can gain bipartisan support, many lawmakers are waiting until they review the text to make a decision on whether to support it.

The bill would limit spending and expand work requirements

The measure was unveiled Sunday evening just after Biden and McCarthy spoke to discuss final details.

If passed, the bill would:

• Set spending caps for the federal budget in the first two years in 2024 and 2025, and then sets appropriations targets for the following four years;
• Raise the age of food stamp recipients subject to work reporting time limit requirements from 50 to 54, but only until 2030;
• Create new exemptions that waive work requirements for: young adults ages 18 to 24 aging out of foster care, and all veterans and those experiencing homelessness, but also only until 2030;
• Place new restrictions on how often states can waive work requirements for food stamp recipients; require the Agriculture Department to publish a report of which state waivers it approves and rejects;
• Reduce the timeline for when environmental impact statements need to be released for proposed projects;
• Reform how federal agencies conduct environmental impact statements;
• Claw back funding for the Internal Revenue Service;
• End the current pause on student loan repayments and interest accrual 60 days after June 30.

The measure would also recover unspent pandemic funding, including money allocated by the American Rescue Plan and the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act, both landmark COVID relief packages. Republicans previously touted clawing back billions from these measures.

These rescissions include federal funding originally allocated for COVID testing, vaccine coordination at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and vaccine distribution, and for mental health awareness and education, and different industry pandemic responses including agriculture and railroads.

Biden and McCarthy are urging Congress to pass the bill

On Sunday night, Biden said he will “strongly urge both chambers to pass that agreement.” He told reporters upon his return to the White House on Sunday he expects to see the bill on his desk.

The president previously insisted he wanted Congress to authorize a debt ceiling increase without any conditions. But in April, House Republicans approved a bill that would raise the debt ceiling in exchange for spending cuts. GOP negotiators used that proposal as a framework for talks with the White House.

Asked what he’ll tell some Democrats who say he made too many concessions, Biden disputed that stance.

“They’ll find I didn’t,” Biden said.

The House speaker told reporters Sunday morning he expects to get a majority of support from his GOP conference, despite early signs of pushback from some members.

“We’re going to have Republicans and Democrats be able to move this to the president,” McCarthy said.

If the bill is approved in the House chamber, it would then head to the Senate for a days-long process to try to greenlight the plan before it can head to the president’s desk.

Senators were briefed on the plan Sunday evening. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., warned them that as a result of some opposition to the plan, they should be prepared to vote on the measure as early as Friday and into the weekend.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who has been steadfast in his belief that a deal would be reached in time to avert default, lauded the agreement.

“Today’s agreement makes urgent progress toward preserving our nation’s full faith and credit and a much-needed step toward getting its financial house in order,” McConnell said, urging swift passage in the Senate.

The timeline to avoid a default remains tight. On Friday, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen updated her guidance on the so-called “X date” — when the U.S. would run out of money to pay its bills — to June 5. Previously she had said it would be as early as June 1.

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

States along the West Coast and in the Northeast have the highest shares of households with same-sex couples, according to the latest 2020 census results released Thursday.

The new numbers from the Census Bureau make up the most comprehensive statistics the federal government has produced to date about married and unmarried same-sex couples living together.

But many other LGBTQ+ people, including those who are not living with a partner or are in different-sex relationships, remain invisible in this key national dataset that’s used to determine political representation, enforce civil rights protections, inform research and policymaking, and guide an estimated $1.5 trillion a year in federal money for public services in local communities.

“A lot is tied to Census Bureau data,” says Kerith Conron, research director of the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law. “Being invisible in those systems or only sort of partially counted is, I think, problematic.”

Former President Donald Trump’s administration blocked efforts to get questions about sexual orientation and gender identity onto a Census Bureau survey that’s considered a testing ground for changes to the forms for the decennial national head count.

Now, the Biden administration has renewed that process as advocates for more official statistics about LGBTQ+ populations continue to grapple with long-standing data gaps that make it difficult to fully understand people’s needs amid rising anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment from right-wing groups.

Why are only same-sex couples who live together represented in 2020 census data about LGBTQ+ people?

While forms for the last U.S. census did include a question about a person’s sex with options for “male” and “female,” they did not ask about sexual orientation or gender identity.

The bureau, however, did provide checkboxes for a question about household relationships that allowed people to identify as a “same-sex” or “opposite-sex” spouse or unmarried partner. Those new response options were introduced to improve the agency’s data about same-sex couples, which the bureau first began collecting in 1990 by matching people’s responses about their sex and household relationship.

That way of conducting a once-a-decade census produces only “a piece of the puzzle,” says Conron of the Williams Institute, which tracks estimates of the country’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender populations.

“At this point, less than 20% of LGBT people live in same-sex couple households,” Conron explains, based on the institute’s estimates. “That means we don’t know a lot about the 80% or more of LGBT people who have different-sex partners or aren’t living in a household with a partner. And that’s significant.”

For Josie Caballero, the lack of an opportunity to identify as a trans woman on the 2020 census was disappointing.

“If we’re not asking the question, if you’re trans or not, in these surveys, it is impossible for us to actually identify those disparities and make sure that funds and resources go to the communities that are desperately in need,” adds Caballero, who is the director of the U.S. Trans Survey and special projects for the National Center for Transgender Equality.

What is the Biden administration doing to get more comprehensive census data about LGBTQ+ people?

Late last year, the Justice Department sent a formal request to the Census Bureau for questions about sexual orientation and gender identity to be added to the bureau’s American Community Survey, which goes out to about 1 in 38 households every year, according to a recently released working paper by a bureau official.

“The request included citations of several statutes to justify the collection, including a need for data to properly enforce discrimination laws,” wrote Andrew Roberts, the chief of the agency’s sex and age statistics branch. Roberts also referenced a 2020 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that confirmed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects workers against discrimination based on their sexual orientation or gender identity.

Changes to the census questions are often tested first on experimental versions of the American Community Survey. The bureau — which has been asking about sexual orientation and gender identity on an experimental survey about how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting households — is planning more experiments starting this year on how the American Community Survey can ask about these topics in English and Spanish after the administration requested $10 million for this research.

Are there privacy concerns related to using the census to collect more data, especially with more anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment from right-wing groups?

Federal law prohibits the federal government from releasing personally identifiable census records until 72 years after a head count’s Census Day, and it is illegal for the government to use census data against a person.

But the rise of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and sentiment among right-wing politicians and other groups has underlined concerns about how census data can be misused and individuals can be re-identified in anonymized statistics, a risk the bureau has been trying to address through a new, controversial privacy protection system.

Protecting the confidentiality of people’s information, however, may be harder with AI and other advances in computing becoming more accessible to bad actors who may try to trace publicly available statistics back to an individual by cross-referencing different datasets, says Stephen Parry, a senior statistical consultant at Cornell University who has written about best practices for collecting gender and sex data.

“I do think that the question about privacy is important, but I also wonder whether people weight privacy as not being as important as it was in the past because they are so used to giving up their privacy and showing on social media facets of their lives that previous generations hadn’t,” Parry adds.

One of the guidelines for collecting data on sexual orientation and gender identity that the Biden administration has released is to allow survey participants to choose whether or not to respond to those kinds of questions and “make an informed decision about whether to provide this information based on its intended uses, potential risks, and their privacy preferences.”

“I think that people being given an opportunity to volunteer that information is important,” says Rebecca Moon, president of the Shoals Diversity Center, a nonprofit organization based in Florence, Ala., that offers mental health support for the LGBTQ+ community and supports increasing government data collection. “Not everyone is out, especially in the South. There’s a lot of LGBTQ hatred.”

Caballero of the National Center for Transgender Equality says it’s “a very scary time” for many transgender people living in the U.S. and not feeling comfortable reporting your gender identity to the government is “very valid.”

But, Caballero adds, those who do choose to be counted as transgender for the census, if given the chance one day, make it “easier for the next trans person to tell their story and say that they are here.”

“You can’t argue with the fact that hundreds of thousands of trans folks have been able to say in a quantitative, scientific way that we exist and this is what it looks like to live here,” Caballero says. “And if we did not have that data, it would be extremely difficult to prove that we deserve human rights.”

Edited by Benjamin Swasey

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

If the U.S. defaults on its debt, the fallout could be huge for Americans.

And not just for retirees who may not get Social Security payments on time, or military veterans who may have trouble accessing benefits, or federal employees and contractors who may see a lag in payments owed to them. The cost of borrowing money would soar, making it harder for everyone to buy homes, cars, or pay off credit card debts.

It could make things worse for families at a time when many are already under financial strain. Inflation remains high, and Americans have racked up almost $1 trillion in credit card debt. That’s up 17% from a year ago, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

The Treasury Department says Congress has until June 1 to raise the federal debt limit. With negotiations still going and time running out, here are some ways to prepare your finances for a worst-case debt default scenario.

Tried and true basics

“We’re advising people to prepare for a potential default as you would for an impending recession,” says Anna Helhoski of NerdWallet.

That means tamping down on excess spending, making a budget, and shoring up emergency savings to cover at least three months of living expenses.

Since a debt default would likely send interest rates soaring, any credit card debt you’re saddled with may soon cost you more. Personal finance experts advise paying off those debts with the highest interest rates as quickly as possible.

While tightening finances, you may find that keeping up with car payments or a home mortgage will become a struggle. Helhoski recommends reaching out to lenders early to discuss any options for lowering payments, adding that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has “housing counselors who can also help homeowners explore any alternatives to delinquency and anything that would have long lasting impacts on their credit.”

Don’t panic

The stock market will certainly take a hit if the U.S. defaults on its debt. At moments, the losses could seem significant to anyone with investments or retirement accounts.

But for those with diversified portfolios who aren’t nearing retirement, investment experts advise that you stay the course.

“Fight your worst instinct to act on the news,” says Teresa Ghilarducci, labor economist and retirement security expert at The New School. “All the academic research shows that if you buy and hold, you will do so much better than if you try to follow market trends, whether that be responding to an economic crisis or a recession.”

Historically, markets have roared back after major declines. Stocks rebounded following the Arab oil embargo in the 1970s, Black Monday in the ’80s, the dot-com bubble of the early aughts, and certainly the 2008 financial crisis, according to an analysis by MFS Investment Management of market recoveries dating back to the Great Depression.

Act fast, or postpone big purchases

If you’re in the market for a new car or home, what you can afford today may be well beyond reach in a matter of weeks. It may be wise to close that deal on a new car now. And make sure your interest rate is locked in, if you are working towards closing on a home.

Real estate website Zillow estimates mortgage rates could reach 8.4% in the event of a default, which would send a chill through a housing market already on ice thanks to the interest rate hikes of the last year.

“You’ll see a dramatic drop in buyers and when that happens, then you’re going to see property prices fall, a halt on different construction and home improvement projects,” says Artin Babayan, a home loan officer based in Los Angeles.

By some estimates, housing activity accounts for nearly a fifth of the U.S. economy. A stall in the real-estate market would reverberate, Babayan notes.

“I think it’ll really screw up the economy,” he adds.

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Memorial Day weekend is upon us, kicking off the busy summer vacation season, and airlines are forecasting that this could be their busiest summer ever. Industry projections indicate that despite relatively high airfares, U.S. airlines could carry a record number of passengers this summer, even though they’re still operating fewer flights than before the pandemic.

The coming months are likely to be a “stress test” for a national aviation system plagued by recent staffing shortages, antiquated technology, air traffic control problems, scheduling issues and labor disputes.

After widespread flight delays and cancellations last year, consumer advocates and some within the travel industry worry air travelers could face similar disruptions that will mess up their summer travel plans again.

If you’re among those hoping to jet off to somewhere fun this summer, here’s what you can expect.

Long lines and packed planes starting this weekend

“This summer’s travel demand will be as strong as we’ve seen since before the pandemic and potentially the strongest ever,” says Geoff Freeman, president and CEO of the U.S. Travel Association, which represents airlines, hotels and other travel-related businesses.

The crush of travelers starts Memorial Day weekend, with AAA forecasting that about 3.4 million Americans will be flying this Thursday through Monday.

Including the numbers of commercial airline flights and those on smaller general aviation aircraft, there will be more than 313,000 flights over the seven-day holiday period from May 24 to May 30, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. While that is just below pre-pandemic 2019 levels, the airlines may actually be flying more people by using bigger planes than they normally would on many routes.

The FAA projects that this Thursday will be the busiest day of the Memorial Day weekend, with more than 51,000 flights forecast.

Among the commercial airlines, United is predicting this Memorial Day weekend will be its busiest in more than a decade. Delta expects a whopping 17% increase in passengers from last year.

“The airports are packed,” says Steve Solomon, chief commercial officer of the Airlines Reporting Corp., which processes and tracks airline ticket sales. “So travelers should prepare to get to the airport early, allow adequate time to get through security screening, through the TSA, and expect to see a lot of people on really full planes.”

Solomon says Europe is especially popular this summer, with huge increases in the number of airline tickets purchased for the top ten destinations across the Atlantic, even though prices are up significantly.

“Summer 2022 was pretty rocky”

If last summer is any indication, air travelers might be in for some turbulence before they get off the ground this summer.

“Things were very bad for air travelers last year. They were as bad as they’ve been in 25 years or more,” says Andre Delattre, national program director for PIRG, the Public Interest Research Group. The consumer advocacy group analyzed airline passenger complaints filed with the U.S. Department of Transportation.

“There were five times more complaints in 2022 compared to 2019 before the pandemic, even though fewer people were flying,” he says.

Airlines delayed and canceled a staggering number of flights last year — more than 210,000 were canceled, according to the flight tracking firm FlightAware. “Other than the early months of the pandemic, that’s more canceled flights than any year since 2001, when, of course, 9/11 disrupted air travel,” Delattre says.

A recent Government Accountability Office investigation found that the sharp increase in airline flight disruptions in recent years was largely caused by factors within the airlines’ control, including maintenance issues, technology glitches and staffing problems.

Even though taxpayers shelled out $50 billion to keep airlines in business and pilots, flight attendants and other employees on the payrolls during the pandemic, airlines offered early retirements and other incentives for workers, including experienced flight crews and ground crews, to leave.

Then air travel demand returned much more quickly than airlines expected. Many tried to cash in with aggressive scheduling, but the staff was stretched too thin to meet that demand, especially during severe weather, which led flight crews to time out without fresh crew members to replace them. With planes and flight crews out of place and too few replacements available, it would take some airlines a week or more to get caught up from one series of thunderstorms.

Add to that a new pilot training backlog, and shortages of mechanics, maintenance workers, gate agents and customer service staff, along with technology glitches and outdated scheduling software at some airlines, and it all cascaded into several periods over the last year in which hundreds of thousands of would be travelers were stranded, the worst of which was over the Christmas holiday, when Southwest alone had to cancel 17,000 flights.

Airlines say they’re better prepared now

American and its rival airlines all say they’re much better prepared for this summer than last. They’ve all gone on a hiring spree, with passenger airlines adding nearly 4,500 employees just in March alone.

The industry now employs more than 486,000 workers in the U.S., nearly 10% more than they had before the pandemic.

Most airlines handled the recent surge in spring break travelers relatively well, and the cancellation rate so far this year is down significantly from last year. According to the federal Bureau of Transportation Statistics, airlines canceled 1.7% of flights over the first three months of this year, far lower than the 2.7% flight cancellation rate for all of last year, and 4.1% for the first quarter of 2022.

“We are as prepared as we can possibly be,” says Nick Calio, president and CEO of Airlines for America, the lobbying group representing the nation’s biggest air carriers. “We’ve got a lot more employees. We have reduced our schedules and adjusted how we’re flying,” in an effort to minimize flight disruptions.

But many industry experts warn travelers to be prepared for significant flight delays and cancellations anyway, caused by things outside of the airlines’ control.

The FAA’s air traffic control issues

While the Biden administration is turning up the heat on the airlines to fulfill their obligations to passengers, the airlines are growing frustrated with the federal government’s own aviation shortcomings.

The FAA warns that a significant shortage of air traffic controllers overseeing the very congested New York area airspace could increase flight delays into and out of Newark, LaGuardia and JFK airports by 45% this summer.

In addition, the chronically underfunded FAA is also struggling to replace outdated technology. The failure of a pilot notification system in January led the FAA to briefly halt all flight departures nationwide, causing thousands of flight delays and cancellations that day.

Meanwhile, Customs and Border Protection staffing shortages in many airports has led to hourslong waits for international travelers returning to the U.S. to get through customs.

Geoff Freeman of U.S. Travel puts the blame for many of these problems not on the airlines, but on Congress and the federal government.

“These problems have come out of years and years of underinvestment,” Freeman says. “If the government doesn’t act now, the headaches won’t just happen during peak travel season and holidays, it will become our daily reality.”

Summer air travel tips

Airline passengers who run into problems from flight disruptions to lost luggage this summer can find out more about their rights and the airlines’ responsibilities at the Department of Transportation’s Office of Aviation Consumer Protection. The site also links to a dashboard listing which airlines are willing to pay for meals, ground transportation, hotels and other expenses incurred because of significant delays and cancellations that are the airline’s fault. It also link to a site where consumers can file complaints.

Experts recommend booking flights earlier in the day as storms tend to develop later in the afternoon and evening. It’s also a good idea to check the weather forecast for your destination and any cities where you have a layover. The FAA has a site showing where severe weather may cause problems for air travelers each day.

Use the airline’s app to track not just whether your flight is on time, but where the plane is coming from and if there are delays there. Book nonstop flights, if possible, so you don’t get stranded on a layover.

Travelers who are checking luggage should also be sure to pack an extra change of clothes or two and medications and other necessities in their carry-on bag, in case there’s a significant delay or cancellation after you’ve checked in.

The bottom line for those of us flying this summer is to plan ahead, prepare for the worst — and hope for the best.

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

The rush in conservative states to ban abortion after the overturn of Roe v. Wade is resulting in a startling consequence that abortion opponents may not have considered: fewer medical services available for all women living in those states.

Doctors are showing — through their words and actions — that they are reluctant to practice in places where making the best decision for a patient could result in huge fines or even a prison sentence. And when clinics that provide abortions close their doors, all the other services offered there also shut down, including regular exams, breast cancer screenings, and contraception.

The concern about repercussions for women’s health is being raised not just by abortion rights advocates. One recent warning comes from Jerome Adams, who served as surgeon general in the Trump administration and is now working on health equity issues at Purdue University in Indiana.

In a recent tweet thread, Adams wrote that “the tradeoff of a restricted access (and criminalizing doctors) only approach to decreasing abortions could end up being that you actually make pregnancy less safe for everyone, and increase infant and maternal mortality.”

Medical ‘brain drain’

An early indication of that impending medical “brain drain” came in February, when 76% of respondents in a survey of more than 2,000 current and future physicians say they would not even apply to work or train in states with abortion restrictions. “In other words,” wrote the study’s authors in an accompanying article, “many qualified candidates would no longer even consider working or training in more than half of U.S. states.”

Indeed, states with abortion bans saw a larger decline in medical school seniors applying for residency in 2023 compared with states without bans, according to a study from the Association of American Medical Colleges. While applications for OB-GYN residencies are down nationwide, the decrease in states with complete abortion bans was more than twice as large as those with no restrictions (10.5% vs. 5.2%).

That means fewer doctors to perform critical preventive care like Pap smears and screenings for sexually transmitted diseases, which can lead to infertility.

Care for pregnant women specifically is at risk, as hospitals in rural areas close maternity wards because they can’t find enough professionals to staff them — a problem that predated the abortion ruling but has only gotten worse since.

In March, Bonner General Health, the only hospital in Sandpoint, Idaho, announced it would discontinue its labor and delivery services, in part because of “Idaho’s legal and political climate” that includes state legislators continuing to “introduce and pass bills that criminalize physicians for medical care nationally recognized as the standard of care.”

Amplified risks

Heart-wrenching reporting from around the country shows that abortion bans are also imperiling the health of some patients who experience miscarriage and other nonviable pregnancies. Earlier this year, a pregnant woman with a nonviable fetus in Oklahoma was told to wait in the parking lot until she got sicker after being informed that doctors “can’t touch you unless you are crashing in front of us.”

A study from University of Buffalo researchers in the Women’s Health Issues journal finds that doctors practicing in states that restrict abortion are less likely than those in states that allow abortion to have been trained to perform the same early abortion procedures that are used for women experiencing miscarriages early in pregnancy.

But it’s more than a lack of doctors that could complicate pregnancies and births. States with the toughest abortion restrictions are also the least likely to offer support services for low-income mothers and babies. Even before the overturn of Roe, a report from the Commonwealth Fund, a nonpartisan research group, found that maternal death rates in states with abortion restrictions or bans were 62% higher than in states where abortion was more readily available.

Women who know their pregnancies could become high-risk are thinking twice about getting or being pregnant in states with abortion restrictions. Carmen Broesder, an Idaho woman who chronicled her difficulties getting care for a miscarriage in a series of viral videos on TikTok, told ABC News she does not plan to try to get pregnant again.

“Why would I want to go through my daughter almost losing her mom again to have another child?” she said. “That seems selfish and wrong.”

Make birth free?

The anti-abortion movement once appeared more sensitive to arguments that its policies neglect the needs of women and children. An icon of the anti-abortion movement — Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.), who died in 2007 — made a point of partnering with liberal Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) on legislation to expand Medicaid coverage and provide more benefits to address infant mortality in the late 1980s.

Few anti-abortion groups are following that example by pushing policies to make it easier for people to get pregnant, give birth, and raise children. Most of those efforts are flying under the radar.

This year, Americans United for Life and Democrats for Life of America put out a joint position paper urging policymakers to “make birth free.” Among their suggestions are automatic insurance coverage, without deductibles or copays, for pregnancy and childbirth; eliminating payment incentives for cesarean sections and in-hospital deliveries; and a “monthly maternal stipend” for the first two years of a child’s life.

“Making birth free to American mothers can and should be a national unifier in a particularly divided time,” says the paper. Such a policy could not only make it easier for people to start families, but it could address the nation’s dismal record on maternal mortality.

But a make-birth-free policy seems unlikely to advance very far or very quickly in a year when the same Republican lawmakers who support a national abortion ban are even more vehemently pushing for large federal budget cuts in the debt ceiling fight.

That leaves abortion opponents at something of a crossroads: Will they follow Hyde’s example and champion policies that expand and protect access to care? Or will women’s health suffer under the movement’s victory?

KFF Health News, formerly known as Kaiser Health News (KHN), is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.

Copyright 2023 KFF Health News. To see more, visit KFF Health News.

Human activities have caused more than half of the world’s largest lakes to shrink dramatically over the last 30 years, according to a new study published in the journal Science. The implications pose risks to human health, economies and the natural world.

Combined, researchers found, the global decline in water storage equivalent to 17 Lake Meads — the largest reservoir in the U.S.

People overusing water for agriculture and development, and human-caused climate change are the primary drivers of the decline, particularly in natural lakes, said Fangfang Yao, the study’s lead author. In reservoirs, dirt and sand piled up behind dams also played a major role in declining water levels.

The findings were staggering, the authors said.

“Roughly one-quarter of the world’s population lives in a basin with a drying lake,” Yao said. “So the potential impact could be significant.”

The study looked at nearly 2,000 of the planet’s largest lakes and reservoirs using three decades of satellite observations and climate models to measure how bodies of water have shrunk or grown over time, and to parse out what influenced the change. For example, did a lake shrink because of increased evaporation with hotter temperatures, or because it was diverted for agriculture?

The findings revealed “significant declines,” the research paper said, across 53% of the lakes and reservoirs surveyed by the team from the University of Colorado Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences.

At least half of the decline in natural lakes was driven by human-caused climate change and overconsumption. That’s a finding, Yao said, that should help water managers better manage and protect threatened lakes around the world.

“If you know a lake is falling and that loss was attributable to human activities, can we put more of an emphasis on conservation and improving water efficiency?” Yao said.

A climate change-driven megadrought and an ever-growing human thirst have continued to drain the two largest reservoirs in the U.S. — Lake Powell and Lake Mead, which the Colorado River feeds. Lake Chad, one of Africa’s largest freshwater lakes which supplies nearly 40 million people with water, has shrunk by an estimated 90% since the 1960s.

The United Nations regards access to safe drinking water as a universal human right. But its own figures show roughly 2 billion people around the world do not have access to it and roughly half the world’s population experiences severe water scarcity at least once a year.

“Uncertainties are increasing,” said Richard Connor, the editor-in-chief of a U.N. water report published earlier this year at a press conference in late March, where world leaders met to try and find better strategies for managing the planet’s rare freshwater. “If we don’t address it, there will definitely be a global crisis.”

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.