This forum is committed to informing and educating our visitors. A life threatening problem exists involving dramatically declining supplies of pure, safe, delicious water which is affecting nearly every living man, woman and child around the globe; what experts label as the most important political and environmental issue of the 21st Century -

AND the noble investment opportunities designed to support those who are adversely affected.

http://water.org/FileUploads/H2OCrisisFactSheet08.pd

World Water Crisis 

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1724375,00.html

The Staff of Life
Water, Earth's most precious resource, serves simultaneously as habitat, nourishment and cleanser. Brazil's Pantanal River, for example, is home to 3,500 species of plants, 400 kinds of fish, 650 bird species, 100 kinds of mammals and 80 types of reptiles. It is not only a vital waterway for man, but an essential filter for the impurities he leaves behind.

Source
Underground aquifers, dozens of miles deep and hundreds of miles wide, are the Earth's second-largest reserve of fresh water, after ice caps and glaciers. Filled over billions of years, they are today being drained at two to four times their natural recharge rate. In this photo, a team of recreational spelunkers drop into the 160-foot deep Neversink Pit in Alabama, which local cavers have bought to preserve for future generations.

Sacred Bath
Shamans in Ecuador perform a soul-cleansing ritual at Peguche Falls during the Inti Raymi fiesta, an ancient Incan celebration of the sun. It is believed that water gives a person power to work and the courage to dance for the fiesta.

Dried Up Seabed
The Aral Sea has lost two-thirds of its volume because its source rivers were diverted for cotton irrigation during the Soviet era. Once the fourth-largest lake in the world, it is now a dusty graveyard of rusting shipwrecks.

Digging Deep
More than two billion people worldwide rely on wells for their water. As water tables continue to drop, many of them, like these Kenyan villagers on Pate Island, devote countless hours to collecting and hauling the valuable resource. The pits in this photo, taken less than 300 feet from the ocean's edge, yield a brackish, but drinkable water.

Short Supply
Residents of a slum in a Delhi, India scramble for the water that is delivered to them daily. The camp is home to approximately 4,000 migrant workers, but lacks a clean water supply, so the workers are dependent on public and private trucks to bring it to them.

Yuck
Students of Miyun elementary school in Beijing discover the dirty condition of a water sample taken from their local reservoir. Twenty-five to thirty-three percent of Chinese do not have access to safe drinking water.

Fishing Holes
Ice fishermen work their lines on Russia's Ural River, in the shadow of Lenin Steelworks. Worried that the fish are too contaminated to eat, many of these winter anglers send their catch to distant markets for sale.

Pipeline
Because water in Mumbai, India is prohibitively expensive, many residents of this slum rely on leaks found — or created — in the massive tubes that carry water to more affluent neighborhoods. The poor of the city avoid the garbage and human waster surrounding their dwellings by walking on top of the pipelines.

Factory Filth
Wastewater from the state-owned Lianhua MSG Factory in China's Huai River Basin runs out of a pipe. Lianhua, which means "lotus flower" is largest polluter in the region.

Dirty Water
Foul-smelling water mixed with coal had been running from Kenny Stroud's faucet for more than a decade before clean tap water was finally provided by the city of Rawl, West Virginia. Residents of the town with similar problems blame Massey Energy, a coal mining company for the bad water, saying that the problem, caused by the company's practice of dumping coal slurry into local streams and waterways, has caused numerous health problems. In 2007, Massey settled a $30 million lawsuit filed by the state.

Desalination
Spain's drive to develop its southern coast for tourism has required it to tap the Mediterranean Sea for fresh water. The country's 700 desalination plants produce 800 million gallons yearly.

Filtration
Two Sudanese boys drink with specially fitted plastic tubes provided by the Carter Center to guard against the water-borne larvae which are responsible for guinea worm disease. The program has distributed millions of tubes and has reduced the spread of this debilitating disease by 70 percent.

Outhouses
The waters of the Niger River Delta are used for defecating, bathing, fishing and garbage. Despite the fact that oil companies have removed more than $400 billion of wealth out of the wetland, local residents have little to show for it.

Toilet Solution
Children in developing countries are afraid of using outhouses and the like because they are dark and smelly and they fear falling into the hole. For this school in India, WaterAid, a British NGO dedicated to delivering safe domestic water, provided funding to build child-friendly toilets.

Research and Development
Engineers work at Caroma, an Australian company that is developing improved low-flow toilets. Their product uses only three-quarters of a gallon of water to flush, compared with standard low-flow toilets, which use more than a gallon and a half.

Slow the Melt
The glaciers that provide Europe with drinking water have lost more than half their volume in the last century. In this photo, workers at the Pitztal Glacier ski resort in Austria push a fleece-like blanket down the glacier's slope to protect the snow during the summer months.

Emergency Supply
Chinese soldiers examine bottled water in Harbin after the city's 3.8 million residents lost access to drinking water for five days due to a chemical plant explosion in 2005. The announcement of water stoppages led to panic buying of water and food, sending prices soaring.

Seedling
The low-cost KB Drip system provides small time farmers in India with the ability to channel irrigated water, thus giving them the opportunity to work more efficiently and lift themselves out of poverty. The project was developed by International Development Enterprises, backed by the New York-based Acumen fund, which recruits machine shops to make the materials and enlists local retailers to distribute them, all for a profit.

Ring Around the Well
The Chilukwa Primary School in Malawi provides its students with a sound education, but until recently the school had no running water or bathrooms. The Peer Water Exchange (PWX), a platform for crafting local solutions to specific water problems, helped secure funding for a local organization to build a community tap, latrines and bathing facilities.

Refreshing
Vietnamese children like Tran Quoc Xu, 11, used to spend a significant portion of their day fetching water. Today, a water system funded by the Blue Planet Run Foundation and PWX means that villagers in Dong Lam hamlet need not travel great distances or pay lots of money for their water.

World Water Crisis

In the extraordinary new book Blue Planet Run, hundreds of photographers from all over the world track mankind's vital race to provide safe drinking water to the one billion people who lack it... Presented by TIME in Partnership with CNN

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1724375,00.html

World water crisis worsened by corruption, repression: UN report

20 February 2006 – Corruption, restricted political rights and limited civil liberties are all factors that lie behind the planet’s growing water crisis, says a new United Nations report that focuses on the precious resource of fresh water.

The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) said today that the second edition of the UN World Water Development Report shows the global water crisis is largely a crisis of governing systems that “determine who gets what water, when and how, and decides who has the right to water and related services.”

The report will be released on 9 March in Mexico City by Gordon Young, Coordinator of the UN World Water Assessment Programme (WWAP), and Cristobal Jaime Jazquez, Director-General of the National Water Commission of Mexico.

Entitled “Water, a Share Responsibility,” the report builds on the conclusions of the first water development study published three years ago. It presents a comprehensive picture of freshwater resources in all regions and most countries as it tracks progress towards the water-related targets of the UN Millennium Development Goals. Known collectively as the MDGs, these targets were set at a 2000 UN Summit and aim to reduce major global ills such as poverty, illiteracy and hunger by 2015.

The report examines a variety of key issues, including population growth and increasing urbanization, changing ecosystems, food protection, health, industry and energy. It also looks at risk management and how water is valued and paid for. A set of conclusions and recommendations to guide future actions and encourage the sustainable use and management of the world’s increasing scarce freshwater resources are also included.

The UN World Water Development Report is a joint undertaking of 24 UN agencies in partnership with governments and other stakeholders and is produced on their behalf by the Water Assessment Programme, whose secretariat is hosted by UNESCO.

The second edition will be launched one week before the Fourth World Water Forum that will be held in Mexico City from March 16 to 22. The report will be formally presented by UNESCO Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura.

Water Facts

http://water.org/learn-about-the-water-crisis/facts/

Today’s water crisis is not an issue of scarcity, but of access. More people in the world own cell phones than have access to a toilet. And as cities and slums grow at increasing rates, the situation worsens. Every day, lack of access to clean water and sanitation kills thousands, leaving others with reduced quality of life.

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Water in the News

Resource Links

Look for more facts in our collection of Water Resource Links.

References

1. 2006 United Nations Human Development Report.
   Number estimated from statistics in the 2006 United Nations Human Development Report.
   Asian Development Bank web site. 2009.
   The Discovery Channel web site. 2009.
   UNICEF/WHO. 2008. Progress on Drinking Water and Sanitation: Special Focus on Sanitation.
   UN. 2007. International Year of Sanitation Global Launch
   UN Water. 2008. Gender, Water and Sanitation: A Policy Brief.
   UN Water. 2008. Tackling a Global Crisis: International Year of Sanitation 2008
   Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC). 2008. A Guide to Investigating One of the Biggest Scandals of the Last 50 Years.
   Rajesh Shah of Blue Planet Run Foundation.
   World Health Organization. 2008. Safer Water, Better Health: Costs, benefits, and sustainability of interventions to protect and promote health.
   World Health Organization Fact Sheet Health in Water Resources Development.
   Diarhhoea: Why children are still dying and what can be done. UNICEF, WHO 2009
   United Nations World Water Development Report, “Water in a Changing World”
   http://www.dfid.gov.uk/consultations/past-consultations/water-sanitation-background.pdf" rel="nofollow">DfiD [Department for International Development] Sanitation Reference Group. 2008.
   2004, Wastewater Use in Irrigated Agriculture
   (sewer illustration) Boston Water and Sewer Commission

Peak Renewable Water: This is the limit reached when humans take the entire renewable flow of a river or stream for our use. Water is renewable, but there is a limit to how much can be used. Humans have already reached “peak renewable water” limits on the Colorado River. We use it all and can’t take any more. In fact, of course, we probably shouldn’t even take as much as we do, for ecological reasons (see “Peak Ecological Water” below).

Increasingly, we are reaching peak renewable limits on many of our rivers and streams. The Yellow River in China no longer reaches the sea much of the year. The Aral Sea has been devastated because the entire flows of the Amu and Syr Darya rivers have been consumed. The Nile Delta is typically dry much of the year.

Peak Non-Renewable Water: While much of our water supply is renewable, there are “non-renewable” water sources as well, where our use of water depletes or degrades the source. This most typically takes the form of groundwater aquifers that we pump out faster than nature recharges them — exactly like the concept of “peak oil.” Over time, groundwater becomes depleted, more expensive to tap, or effectively exhausted. Central Valley aquifers are overpumped, unsustainably, to the tune of 1-to-2 million acre-feet a year. So are groundwater aquifers in India, China, the Great Plains, and other places. This cannot continue indefinitely — it runs into peak non-renewable water limits.

Peak Ecological Water: The third definition, and perhaps the most important (and difficult) one, is peak “ecological” water — the point where any additional human uses cause more harm (economic, ecological, or social) than benefit. We’re good at measuring the “benefits” of more human use of water (semiconductors manufactured, or food produced, or economic value generated), but we’re bad at measuring on an equal footing, the ecological “costs” or harm caused by that same use of water. As a result, species are driven to extinction, habitat is destroyed, water purification capabilities of marshes and wetlands are lost. For many watersheds around the world, we are reaching, or exceeding, the point of “peak ecological water.”

California as a whole may not have quite reached peak water, but parts of California and some of our water systems are long past the point of peak water, in all three definitions of the term. We’ve done a great job in this state at capturing, storing, moving, and using water. But there are limits — an idea still lost on some of our policymakers, such as those who recently lamented our inability to capture and use every drop of water that fell in the recent extreme storms — a 19th century notion long ago overwhelmed and overtaken by physical, economic, and environmental realities. Large new surface water storage is simply not going to happen (though California could do far more with smarter flood-control projects and improved groundwater storage, as I described in a recent Sacramento Bee op-ed. This is a topic for another post).

Many of our groundwater basins are past the point of peak ecological water. The Sacramento-San Joaquin river systems, at some times of the year, are past the point of peak renewable water and peak ecological water because of the devastating ecological impacts of our water use on wetlands, migrating birds, fisheries, aquatic flora, and more. Our water rights allocations from the State and Federal projects exceed peak water limits because they promise more water to users than can ever be delivered.

We struggle from one year to the next, hoping for rain. We refuse to measure and monitor all of our water uses in a system with limits. We shy away from needed conversations about water use priorities and rights. As a result, we’re racing toward peak water limits and we can no longer afford to pretend all the water we want will be available, when we want it, at a cheap price, without consequences. A wet December and January doesn’t change that reality.