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How Do We Ensure Clean Drinking Water for All?

By Khalil Abdullah, New America Media. Posted March 17, 2008.


A group of organizations that implement clean water projects in varying regions of the world have some ideas.

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Washington, D.C. -- The rapture of fresh water dances across the faces of the world's children, whether they appeared in the photographs Gil Garcetti shot along the sand-dusted roads of a morning in Burkino Faso or in the let-it-rock-the-house video from Charity Water.

Among the viewers of the full house that packed the auditorium at the National Geographic headquarters on March 12, was a cohort of representatives from organizations that implement clean water projects in varying regions of the world. They indeed comprised the choir that over 15 speakers were singing to as the WASH-in-Schools Initiative celebrated its U.S. launch. They already understood what Earth Echo International co-founder Alexandra Cousteau meant when she said the issues around access to clean water will be "the defining crisis of this century." And, regrettably, they also were the choir that bore witness to the undiluted truth of Carol Bellamy's succinct summation of the day's topic: "We're talking about death."

Bellamy, President and CEO of World Learning, has been an investment banker, UNICEF"s executive director and a Peace Corps volunteer in the early 1960s. It was in that latter capacity where the stupefying statistic of 1.8 million children dying each year from diarrheal disease related to unclean water washed over her soul. "The first time I encountered death was that little child who died from dehydration," Bellamy recalled, "that child who died in my arms." Bellamy stressed that access to water has to be accompanied by sanitation and hygiene, and starkly described how the lack of sanitation that now affects 2.6 billion people, many of them children, severely curtails education for young girls in developing counties.

Once girls reach the age of menstruation in many cultures, their families will not let them go to school unless there are adequate -- and separate - facilities where they can practice good hygiene, Bellamy explained. So, while water access has improved by degrees worldwide, access to sanitation on the global scale is still wanting.

Another key driver in the marginalization of young girls in education is the almost universal feminization of the task of hauling water. Garcetti's photographs appear in the book "Water is Key: A Better Future for Africa," as part of a fundraising initiative by the Pacific Institute. He spoke of taking pictures as the young girls and women of Burkino Faso went about their daily chores, carrying on their heads containers of water that often weighed between 30 and 40 lbs. They walked two or three miles per trip, often several times a day, in order to have the water necessary for basic human needs. During his assignment, never, Garcetti said, did he see a male involved in this arduous spine-bending but life-giving task, "not one man, not one boy." It was a gender depiction reiterated throughout the morning program by speakers involved in Asia and South and Central America.

The physical task of hauling water is daunting, as some students at Highview Middle School in New Brighton, Minn., discovered as they lugged pails of water around a track. Their efforts were a part of the many fundraising activities for H20 For Life School to School. The non-profit began as an attempt to collect $7,000 for water projects for a school in Kenya. H2O For Life's president and founder, Patty Hall, said, "I had no intentions of doing more than this one project." The students, however, became enthralled with the mission as they began to understand the dire need and that their efforts had direct benefits. They exceeded their monetary goal, raising $13,000. The money paid for well drilling and an earthen dam to retain water closer to the village.


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How Do We Ensure Clean Drinking Water for All?
Posted by: rickiey on Mar 17, 2008 8:27 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Well, if you take the energy problem, the environment problem, and water problem, and put em together, you end up with one solution that helps all three.

Nuclear reactors, on the shores of the ocean.

A side benefit of nuclear reactors, is that they need water evaporators as part of the steam turbine process. A side benefit of these water evaporators, is that they take salt water, and turn it into clean drinking water.

The US Navy has been doing this on board ships and subs for decades.

Of course, to be a truly workable solution, more nuclear fuel recycling facilities must be built, so that there isn't a bunch of nuclear waste. But we already have the technology for that.

This of course, provides an abundance of clean water, and an abundance of power without carbon emissions.

Not bad, eh?

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Forced osmosis is safer way of desalinazaion over nuclear.
Posted by: nightgaunt on Mar 18, 2008 10:59 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
By large converted tankers floating in the oceans. Nuclear-steam plants release radioactive steam and are prone to 'problems' and the risk of large scale contamination as vunerable points of attack. Solar farms and wind-turbine farms,not so much.
30% of oxygen from the forests,70% from the ocean plankton. The oceans are pale ghosts of what they were just 200 years ago.

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UN Sec-General's World Water Day message should be the world is heading toward a global water crisis
Posted by: sav7seas on Mar 22, 2008 5:30 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Today is World Water Day. The United Nations, International Decade for Action “Water for Life” was launched in 2005 on World Water Day to meet the 2015 Millennium Development Goals of providing safe drinking water for half of the one billion people who do not have clean water and to provide sanitation facilities for half of the 2.6 billion people without proper toilets and hygiene.

The beginning of the International Year of Sanitation will be opened today by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon with the message that tragically we are nowhere near being on track to achieving the clean water and sanitation goals. Mainly because world leaders lack the political will to achieve them. Clean water and sanitation would prevent 6,000 child deaths per day.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s message should be that the world is running out of clean fresh water and heading toward an unprecedented global water crisis unless we begin to protect and conserve the world’s fresh water supplies.

Streams, rivers and lakes around the world are being polluted from industrial waste, farm runoff and sewage while underground water supplies are being pumped dry and melting glaciers and surging population are decreasing fresh water supplies.

Ninety percent of the sewage in the developing world goes directly into water supplies. The major rivers and fresh water supplies throughout China, India, Russia, Pakistan, Palestine, Israel, Africa, Latin America and other large regions of the world are extremely polluted.

Nations of the world need to restore the purity of the world’s water by joining together in building a global water purification, distribution and sewage infrastructure including toilet facilities and septic tanks in rural areas. Industrial pollution of all kinds needs to be regulated and phased out. Watersheds, wetlands and forests need to be rebuilt and protected.

The United Nations should establish clean water as a fundamental human right, as Maude Barlow declares in her book, “Blue Covenant The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water”.

Establishing clean water as a human right would require that governments provide their citizens with available clean water.

Global water covenants between nations are needed to establish water protection and conservation standards, justice through debt forgiveness and fair trade and democratic not corporate control of water.

Managing water globally would avoid the “Battles” and catastrophe projected water shortages are sure to cause. Providing clean water for all would ensure a healthy and more secure world.

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How Do We Ensure Clean Drinking Water for All?...
Posted by: Bearzerker on Mar 30, 2008 6:53 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
...Plant, or Re-plant forests, and stop logging old growth forests...

plant forests and/or make forests where forests aren't currently...
the current free for-all property management system is clearly a cause for all concerned.

over population is a major concern...
the planets entire flora and fauna needs to be properly managed or we are all doomed!

nuff said

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