Today is World Water Day. There are events going on all over the world to mark this year’s theme: Clean Water for a Healthy World. You can find some excellent reading here, and you might want to view this video, Water: The Drop of Life.
UNDP notes here that, worldwide, 2.6 billion people lack proper sanitation. “Shortcomings in water governance – how decisions are made about the use of water and provision of water and sanitation services – remain an underlying constraint on better progress towards the MDG water target”
And UNEP says here “Clean, safe, and adequate freshwater is vital to the survival of all living organisms and the smooth functioning of ecosystems, communities, and economies. However, the quality of the world’s water is increasingly threatened as human populations grow, industrial and agricultural activities expand, and climate change threatens to cause major alterations of the hydrologic cycle.” Plus, here is a message for today from Achim Steiner, UNEP’s Executive Director. Steiner rightly emphasizes the importance of building awareness and that the “… focus of that awareness needs to be on the abundant options for more intelligent management of water and on the multiple economic benefits linked with investing and re-investing in this resource.”
For more, see the always-excellent “National Geographic Magazine” and this month’s special issue: Water: Our Thirsty World, including these videos. Also, you should check out Cynthia Schweer’s FPA Blog on “Global Health” and today’s post, Huge returns on water.
I worked for 11 years for the regional office for New York City of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. In looking back at the deep and intense attention we paid to wastewater treatment and clean drinking water, it seems a sort of miracle if you look at the dearth of resources and regulation in most of the developing world. This is a massive undertaking, to be sure, but without clean drinking and ambient water, you can never really achieve the quality of life necessary to propel people forward.
