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Coping in a World of “Peak Water”
Nastassja Hoffet, Inter Press Service (IPS)
As more than 20,000 people meet in Istanbul for a major week-long conference on future management of the world’s water supplies, women’s groups are working to ensure that policy decisions about this critical natural resource take their concerns into account.
About a billion people currently lack safe drinking water, and another two and a half billion have no access to sanitation.
Experts note that women and girls carry the burden of the water crisis since they bear more household responsibilities, such as hygiene, cooking, gathering water, and taking care of children and the sick.
Those tasks expose them to many risks, like contamination by water-related diseases and violence in conflict zones, and often prevent them from going to school or having a job.
According to the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF, in developing countries women and girls walk an average of six kilometres a day carrying 20 litres of water.
“When we use water faster than it is naturally recharged, it is not sustainable,” said Peter Gleick, director of the Pacific Institute, a nonpartisan research organisation based in California.
Unlike oil, water is not a non-renewable resource. However, it is limited by its location and flow. Many experts say the world has now reached “peak water” – meaning that available resources are eclipsed by massive, and growing, demand.
(16 March 2009)
Lack of water still kills
David Bull, Guardian
Today, on World Water Day, we must make a commitment to keep sanitation issues at the top of the development agenda
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World Water Day was first devised at the UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro almost 20 years ago. Several attempts have been made to galvanise the international community since, the latest of which – in Istanbul this week – attracted 25,000 people. Yet 900 million people lack access to clean water and 2.5 billion who do not have basic sanitation. Illness caused by lack of basic sanitation kills over 5,000 children every day and is probably one of the biggest causes of mortality among under-fives in the developing world. Why has so little been achieved?
To reach the targets for the UN millennium development goal on sanitation we would need to spend $10bn annually. It sounds a lot – particularly in this time of financial crisis – but let’s put it in perspective – it is as much as is spent in Europe on ice cream every year. The problem is not a lack of know-how, but a lack of political will and financial backing to see plans through.
Unicef works on this issue because water and sanitation has a huge impact on children.
(22 March 2009)
Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta Becomes Water War’s Front Line
Janet Zimmerman, Riverside Press-Enterprise
The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is the hub of California’s vast water system, and is critical to the farms and cities across much of the state. A court order now restricts water supply from the Delta to other parts of the state in order to protect an endangered fish. That is just one of the problems. Sea level rise and earthquakes could make things worse.
(21 March 2009)
