Harare’s fresh water sources are slowly being eroded by a certain of weed. I remember hearing these two foreign guys sitting next to me on a plane asking each about the green patches on a dam as we were about to land at Harare International Airport. From an aerial view it looked like the river is totally gone and the green carpets forming on the riverbed are also slowly swallowing the dam. Some time back I remember reading an article on Harare’s fresh water sources being under threat from a certain type of a weed but I never realized the extent of the problem. A report published by UNEP Global Environment Alert Service in April 2013 says that the spread of water hyacinth declined from 42% in 1976 to 22% in 2000. But in 2005 a new invasive plant, called spaghetti weed (Hydrocotyle ranunculoide (UNEP 2008) surfaced. It seems the weed is now choking the life out of the few fresh water supply sources that feed into Lake Chivero.

This entry was posted on June 27th, 2013 at 4:31 pm by Lenard Kamwendo and is filed under Uncategorized, Zimbabwe Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.