WATER CRISIS
Keith Lionel Urban & Christina Dian Parmionova
USF’s Patel Center for Global Solutions recently welcomed Robert Adamski, special advisor to the United Nations for the non-profit group “Water for People,” for a presentation on an issue that affects billions of people worldwide – the lack of safe drinking water.
Davos Annual Meeting 2008 REPORTS
“Time Is Running Out for Water”
" WATER FOR LIFE "
Read the Annual Meeting 2008 report
Nearly one-third of the world’s population is expected to be living in regions facing severe water scarcity by 2025.
What should be done now to ensure that water scarcity does not become a source of international conflict and human misery?
Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General, United Nations, New York
Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Nestlé, Switzerland; Member of the Foundation Board of the World Economic Forum
E. Neville Isdell, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, The Coca-Cola Company, USA
Ichiro Kamoshita, Minister of the Environment of Japan
Fred Krupp, President, Environmental Defense, USA
Andrew N. Liveris, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Dow Chemical Company, USAModerator
Ralph R. Peterson, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, CH2M HILL Companies, USA
Does anyone care.
Water and Energy Relief International
CEO Climate Policy Recommendations to G8 Leaders (with Russian translation)
Summary of CEO Statement to G8 on Climate
Blue Planet Run: A Race to Provide Safe Drinking Water to the World
Blue Planet Run represents an extraordinary collaboration of photographers, journalists, leading environmentalists, information designers and athletes who teamed up over the summer of 2007 to put a human face on one of the biggest challenges facing humanity today: the world’s rapidly disappearing source of clean water
One hundred percent of the royalties from Blue Planet Run will be used to provide clean water to the people around the world who desperately need it.“Many people in the developed world still assume the global water crisis has nothing to do with them – that it’s a crisis for ‘those poor people, over there.’ The painful truth is that the water crisis is now on every continent and in cities large and small. This crisis affects every human being on the planet, but most of us just aren’t paying attention yet.”
— Robert Redford, from the ForewordRick Smolan and Jennifer Erwitt, authors of highly acclaimed illustrated books including the New York Times bestselling Day in the Life and America 24/7 series, are releasing Blue Planet Run (Earth Aware Editions, December 2007). A powerful and disturbing visual journey, this book is aimed at sparking a global conversation about a problem that until now has received relatively little attention: the global water crisis.
Water for Life
DEATH BY WATER
Soldiers besieging Sarajevo cut off the electricity supply, and with it the water pumps; people lining up at wells and stand pipes were easily and routinely picked off by snipers or attacked with mortar fire. It’s been common practice in war zones for belligerents to fill wells with rocks, steal pipes and pumping systems, dynamite dams, and pollute what’s left. A revolt in Iraq was crushed by draining the marshes on which the rebels lived and depended. Millions have died in war zones and refugee camps from water-borne diseases.
And water looks increasingly likely to be a cause of war, because there is simply not enough of it to go round. In the mere 40 years up to 1990, global water-use tripled. Its use is inequitable and profligate where it’s relatively easy to get. A western family can use 2000 litres a day; in Africa a few litres of untreated water each have to be carried, often for long distances or in war conditions. The world population is still growing, while water tables fall, underground aquifers empty, lakes shrink and wetlands dry up.
There are fears for war over the Euphrates, the object of a vast damming operation in Turkey which will cut Syria’s water supply by a third – and Turkey threatened to cut Syria off altogether for supporting Turkish dissidents. There are fears for war over the river Jordan: Israel, bent on self-sufficiency, claims all the water it can; but Syria, Jordan and the Palestinians need supplies too. There are fears for war over the Nile: Egypt is diverting river water to irrigate the desert, to grow crops instead of importing them; eight more countries, including drought-devastated Sudan, are in the queue. President Sadat has said: ‘The only matter that could take Egypt to war again is water’