Growing cities, overuse of fertilizers and factory wastewater have degraded China's water supplies to the extent that half the nation's rivers and lakes are severely polluted. China aims to spend $850 billion to improve filthy water supplies over the next decade, but even such huge outlays may do little to reverse damage caused by decades of pollution and overuse in Beijing's push for rapid economic growth. Photo: Fishermen row a boat in the algae-filled Chaohu Lake in Hefei, Anhui province, June 19, 2009. (Photo by Jianan Yu/Reuters)

A man holds a metal bar as a weapon during a training day for former soldiers and volunteers train in a makeshift camp in the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, October 28, 2015. Haiti disbanded its abusive armed forces two decades ago but uniformed veterans and young recruits are resurfacing to add another destabilising factor to the volatile Caribbean nation already dealing with a political vacuum. (Photo by Andres Martinez Casares/Reuters)

A freighter trapped in ice is shown in this aerial photo near Whitefish Bay on Lake Superior northwest of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario April 7, 2015. The biggest ice cover on the Great Lakes in decades is backing up shipments of everything from Canadian grain to U.S. iron and steel in one of North America's most important economic regions. (Photo by Kenneth Armstrong/Reuters)

NASA's DHC-3 Otter plane flies in Operation IceBridge-Alaska surveys of mountain glaciers in Alaska in this image released on September 18, 2014. Over the past few decades, average global temperatures have been on the rise, and this warming is happening two to three times faster in the Arctic. (Photo by Chris Larsen/Reuters/NASA/University of Alaska-Fairbanks)

An orphaned giraffe nuzzling a wildlife keeper at Sarara camp in Kenya, one of 70 pictures being sold by Prints for Nature (printsfornature.com) to raise money for work by the Conservation International charity. This giraffe was rehabilitated and returned to the wild, as a number of others have done before him. Right now, giraffe are undergoing what has been referred to as a silent extinction. Current estimates are that giraffe populations across Africa have dropped 40 percent in three decades, plummeting from approximately 155,000 in the late 1980s to under 100,000 today. (Photo by Ami Vitale/National Geographic)

Egyptian workers eat on a truck in Cairo, Egypt, Sunday, January 22, 2023. Egypt is in an economic crisis is partly caused by the yearlong grinding Russian invasion of Ukraine. But the conflict in Europe has also exposed the frailties of an economy suffering from decades of mismanagement, turmoil from its 2011 Arab Spring popular uprising, years of militant attacks and then, the coronavirus pandemic. (Photo by Amr Nabil/AP Photo)

American Ballet Theater's dancers are silhouetted as they rehearse for the opening night at the Shanghai Grand Theater in Shanghai, Thursday, November 2, 2023. The American national ballet company is returning to China for the first time in a decade for shows in Shanghai and Beijing in the latest sign strained relations between the United States and China are beginning to thaw. (Photo by Ng Han Guan/AP Photo)

Black softshell turtle or Bostami turtle (Nilssonia nigricans), extremely rare and critically endangered species of tortoise is seen in a pond in Chittagong, Bangladesh on March 1, 2022. For decades, the breeding grounds have shrunk and their habitat has been threatened by habitat pollution. (Photo by Mohammad Shajahan/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)