At the UN Water Conference in March 2023, the Water Institute at the University of North Carolina (UNC) along with several key partners, including UNICEF, Water Aid, the World Health Organization, and the governments of Ghana, Uganda, and South Africa, among others, organized a session centered around the elimination of lead in drinking water across the globe.
Chronic water shortages make life increasingly difficult for the more than 10.5 million people who live in the Central American Dry Corridor, an arid strip that covers 35 percent of that region.
“This is a very difficult place to live, because of the lack of water,” said Salvadoran farmer Marlene Carballo, as she cooked corn tortillas for lunch for her family, on a scorching day.
Good management of the 101 hydrographic basins which run from the Andes mountain range to the Pacific Ocean is key to solving the severe water crisis that threatens the people of Chile and their main productive activities.
Water is life. No other definition captures quite so aptly what this essential element means for our lives, livelihoods and the natural environment.
Shockingly, the human suicidal war on Nature not only continues unabated but is also set to become even more virulent. Just to start with, please be reminded that groundwater accounts for 99% of all liquid freshwater on Earth, according to the 2022
UN World Water Development Report.
The rapidly-growing bottled water industry can undermine progress towards a key sustainable development goal: safe water for all, says a new United Nations report.
In contrast to its strategic role as an essential resource to help achieve community development and poverty alleviation globally, groundwater has remained a poorly understood and managed resource.
Burkina Faso’s interim President Captain Ibrahim Traoré spoke late last year of the conflicts that are now blighting his country and much of his region. He described the situation in Burkina Faso as predictable given the endemic weaknesses in governance that he believes have led to the economic abandonment of many young people, particularly outside of urban areas.
When global crises are interlinked, they overlap and compound each other. In such cases, the most effective solutions are those that work at the nexus of all these challenges.
Martín Rapetti, a fourth generation farmer in the province of Corrientes in northeastern Argentina, has already lost more than 30 cows due to lack of food and water, as a result of the long drought that is plaguing a large part of the country. “There is no grass; the animals have to sink their teeth into the dry earth,” he says with resignation.
On March 3, 2022, Malawi declared a cholera outbreak after a district hospital in the southern region reported a case. This was the first case in the 2021 to 2022 cholera season.
Drought is one of the ‘most destructive’ natural disasters in terms of the loss of life, arising from impacts, such as wide-scale crop failure, wildfires and water stress.
The Middle East and North Africa are the world’s most water-scarce regions – with 11 of the 17 water-stressed countries on the globe.
According to UNICEF, nine out of 10 children live in areas with high or very high-water stress, resulting in significant consequences for their health, cognitive development, and future livelihoods.
For those who have it, a toilet is that ‘thing’ in the bathroom, next to the bidet, the hand-washing sink with hot and cold water faucets, and the bathtub.
Several community-run water projects powered by solar energy have improved the quality of life of thousands of rural families in areas that were the scene of heavy fighting during El Salvador's civil war in the 1980s.
The need for potable water led several rural settlements in El Salvador, at the end of the 12-year civil war in 1992, to rebuild what was destroyed and to innovate with technologies that at the time seemed unattainable, but which now benefit hundreds of families.
Global progress has been staggeringly inadequate against Sustainable Development Goal 6, “clean water and sanitation for all.”
According to the latest SDGs progress assessment,
2 billion people still lack safely managed drinking water, 3.6 billion lack sanitation services, and
3 billion lack basic hygiene services.
When I was a child, a friend asked me: “How would you describe a tree to someone who has never seen one?” I looked at the trees surrounding us and realised it was impossible, considering their versatility, beauty and utter strangeness. Since that time, I have often wondered about trees, as well as I have been worried by the indiscriminate destruction of trees and forests.
We tend to associate rivers and lakes with the countries in which they are located. Yet a little-known fact is that more than half of the world’s freshwater bodies are shared.
This is how the Muslims’ Holy Book - the Quran refers to the most precious element of life.