“These poll results demonstrate that the public is out in front of policymakers,

commented CEO Stephen E. Sandherr of the Associated General Contractors of America.

“They recognize that our deteriorating water delivery systems are in need of repair.”

WATER is among the five primordial elements considered to be vital for any type of life or vegetation on this planet. Great civilizations of the world grew and developed on the banks of big watercourses. May it be the grand Nile or the majestic Indus or other lakes and springs, water has been so important that ancient inhabitants choose it as their first preference to settle nearby. Therapeutic value of both food and water mattered to mankind right from the early days.

 Distribution of the earth’s water

Oceans and seas 97.29%
Ice caps and glaciers 2.09%
Underground aquifers 0.61%
Lakes and rivers 0.01%
Atmosphere 0.01%

The need is great in the Developing World!

1 billion people do not have access to safe drinking water

2.9 billion people do not have adequate sanitation facilities

11,000 children die each day of water-related diseases

*******************

Landslide hits town by Three Gorges Dam in China:

BEIJING, China  — Chinese authorities evacuated about 200 people living near the Three Gorges Dam in central China because of a landslide, state media and local officials said.
The landslide hit in Hubei province, inundating 37 homes and a primary school with rocks and mud, the official Xinhua News Agency said. Residents were evacuated to a temporary shelter before the landslide hit and no casualties were reported. Nearly 830,000 people in Hubei have been affected by heavy rain that has poured down on the area, Xinhua said. In addition to the landslide, the rain has caused flash floods, and two people have been killed, Xinhua said. Source

Chevron lashes out at Ecuadoreans who won award for legal battle:

SAN FRANCISCO — Chevron Corp. is sharpening its attacks against two opponents in a 15-year legal battle over whether the oil company should foot a multibillion-dollar bill to clean up a toxic stew in the Amazon rainforests.
The San Ramon-based company intensified its criticism recently while two Ecuadoreans, Pablo Fajardo and Luis Yanza, were in San Francisco to pick up the Goldman Prize, a prestigious honor given to individuals for their environmental achievements. Fajardo and Yanza won the award for spearheading a class-action lawsuit alleging that a company acquired by Chevron poisoned a 1,700-square-mile expanse of the Ecuadorean jungle — an area the size of Rhode Island. Source

South Australian residents reassured of safe drinking water:

Australia – In Adelaide, the government of South Australia and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) assured the public that the state’s drinking water is safe. CSIRO has discovered high levels of zinc, cadmium, aluminium, and arsenic in some wetlands of the Murray River that have been affected by the drought. Source

Citizens’ water caravan in the southern part of the country:

Morocco – From 11 May to 9 June, a caravan will traverse southern Morocco offering films and other activities to raise public awareness of the need for sensible water use. A recent report by the World Bank showed an alarming trend: since 1960, the average amount of groundwater available per person per year has dropped from 2500 cubic meters to 1000 cubic meters. Some experts predict that by 2050, that figure will drop by another 50%. Source

Minot, N.D. could face water supply problems:

MINOT, N.D. — City officials and residents are bracing for water supply problems if an existing dry spell continues into the summer. Without rainfall this spring, people will begin watering earlier than usual, creating a greater demand on the aquifers the city relies on, said Jason Sorenson, superintendent at the Minot Water Treatment Plant. The plant also has seen increased demand for water from companies that use it in the oil fields, though Sorenson said the level of water usage by oil companies is not yet a problem. Public works director Alan Walter said water restrictions are a possibility if the drought conditions continue in the region. Source

Senegal: Potable water and sanitation in the Ndiambour – The case of the Department of Linguere remains worrisome:

Senegal – The Department of Linguere in Senegal is one of the country’s driest, especially in the east, and the national government is searching for ways to build potable water systems there. It’s a knotty problem because of the isolation of many villages – a large number of people are pastoralists, constantly on the move from pasture to pasture – and the lack of roads, explained Awa Ngom Thiam of the Potable Water and Sanitation Program for the Millennium (PEPAM), which will oversee the work. Source

In Sicily, risk of desertification for 70% of the land surface:

Italy- Around three-quarters of the Italian island of Sicily could become a desert, with the areas around Enna, Caltanissetta, and Trapani at particular risk, warned Giovanni Arnone, head of the Regional Council’s Civil Defense Service. Addressing a seminar in Palermo that included President Gian Vito Graziano of the Sicilian Geological Society, he labeled 43.22% of Sicilian land at “very high risk” of desertification and 30.79% at “high risk.” Natural causes – Sicily’s particular geological characteristics, changes in vegetation cover, and frequent droughts and floods — account for much of the damage, but human activities make it worse, he said. Deforestation, heavy population densities in coastal areas, salinization of drawn-down aquifers, and massive pollution by fertilizers are just a few of the human factors that are wreaking havoc with Sicily’s environment. Source

Evian Plans Wetlands Preservation, Adds Recycled Plastic to Bottles:

Atlanta, Ga – Evian has established three new environmental initiatives covering wetlands and water management, recycled plastic and encouraging consumers to recycle. The bottled water producer has created the Evian Water Protection Institute to work with the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands on three water and wetlands management projects. The projects will focus on the La Plata basin in Argentina, Nepal’s Jagadishpur Reservoir and Thailand’s Bung Khong Long Lake. The projects will help local people maintain and restore wetlands, and teach and encourage sustainable management of water. Source

                                                                                             IMPORTANT UPDATE:

‘Water is the new oil,’ conference hears:

Boston — A conference here this week of environmentally oriented investors heard that “water is the new oil” and that businesses relying on increasingly scarce water supplies are no longer taking it for granted, reported an April 29 article on the “Green Tech” blog of CNetNews.com. Attendees at the Ceres Conference heard Chris Williams, director of water programs for World Wildlife Fund, say, “What’s different today is that the global business community is seeing water as a business risk and core to  their operations,” the article said. Source

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how
infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet,
to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—
nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.

Were the Bard alive today, he would be not only be castigating us harshly for having done so much damage to our planet but also for doing so little to repair it save for the efforts of a few thousands of enlightened environmentalists. Sadly, not many politicians have joined the fray, with most playing servants to multinational interests.

“By God, what have you done?”, would say the Bard.

Global Food Crisis: Socrates is reputed to have said that the best sauce for food is hunger and a few millennia later in 1798, English economist Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, earned posterity for his prediction that population would continually increase faster than the food supply, causing chronic food shortages.

“Hell is empty, and all the Devils are here.”

Since 1950, the earth’s population has risen by more than four billion people, to 6.6 billion and UN projections put world population at 9.2 billion by 2050. The world currently faces a food crisis before the full impact of climate change and a 42% rise in population.

“And oftentimes excusing of a fault Doth make the fault the worse by the excuse.”

Historian David Christian writes that just to keep their bodies functioning, humans need about three thousand calories of energy a day. Ten thousand years ago, there may have been six million humans, each consuming at least this much energy, but not much more. Today, there are one thousand times as many humans (more than six billion), so we can be sure that our species now consumes at least one thousand times as much energy as we did ten thousand years ago. At the same time, each modern human consumes on average about fifty times as much energy as our ancestors did ten thousand years ago. If his figures are correct, they suggest that, as a species, we now consume about fifty thousand times as much energy as our ancestors once did. They demonstrate a control over energy that no other species can match. The equivalent graph for chimpanzees (or, for that matter, for any other nonhuman animals) would show no significant change in either total or per capita energy consumption over the last one hundred thousand years or more.

“They have been at a great feast of languages and stolen the scrapes”.

Professor Jeffrey Sachs, UN activist and head of the Earth Institute at New York’s Columbia University, in his recently published book – Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet – recommends a target population of no more than eight billion by mid-century compared with the UN projection of 9.2 billion. For that to happen, a focused effort is required in the poorest parts of the world, mainly Africa, where fertility rates are higher than elsewhere. Two out of three inhabitants of Sub Saharan Africa are under 25 years of age and in India, population rose by 21.34 % between 1991 – 2001. The developing world has five-sixths of the world’s population. As developing countries continue to develop, led by India and China, there will be an acceleration in the attrition of the world’s natural resources. The change in food diets in prospering Asian countries is one reason for the rapid surge in food prices. Sachs forecasts that in the 21st century, the world’s economic center of gravity will shift to Asia which will produce more than half the world’s income. US dominance will end. He says that America traditionally has sought to protect its way of life through militarization but he argues that any US desire for global stability at this point would be better served by spending on foreign aid. Sachs says that in the past half century, the U.S. has spent $17 trillion on its military, $2.3 trillion on aid.

“There’s many a man hath more hair than wit.”

Sachs wrote in Time Magazine in March, that to make the right choice, we must understand four earth-changing trends unprecedented in human history:

* First, the spread of modern economic growth means that the world on average is rapidly getting richer in terms of incomes per person. Moreover, the gap in average income per person between the rich world, centered in the North Atlantic (that is, Europe and the U.S.), and much of the developing world, especially Asia, is narrowing fast. With well over half the world’s population, fast-growing Asia will also become the center of gravity of the world economy.
* Second, the world’s population will continue to rise, thereby amplifying the overall growth of the global economy. Not only are we each producing more output on average, but there will be many more of us by mid-century. The scale of the world’s economic production by mid-century is therefore likely to be several times that of today.
* Third, our bulging population and voracious use of the earth’s resources are leading to unprecedented multiple environmental crises. Never before has the magnitude of human economic activity been large enough to change fundamental natural processes at the global scale, including the climate itself. Humanity has also filled the world’s ecological niches; there is no place to run.
* Fourth, while many of the poor are making progress, many of the very poorest are stuck at the bottom. Nearly 10 million children die each year because their families, communities and nations are too poor to sustain them. The instability of impoverished and water-stressed countries has ignited a swath of violence across the Horn of Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. What we call violent fundamentalism should be seen for what it really is: poverty, hunger, water scarcity and despair.

“The quality of mercy is not strain’d.”

The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), which is based in Bangkok, said in its annual report: <blockquote>”Chronic neglect of the agricultural sector in Asia and the Pacific is condemning 218 million people to continuing extreme poverty, and widening the gap between the region’s rich and poor. Governments must show greater political will to address decades of policy neglect and failure in the agricultural sector,” said Noeleen Heyzer, UN Under-Secretary-General and the Executive Secretary of ESCAP. “It is simply unacceptable that at a time when the economic growth of Asia and the Pacific has surpassed all expectations, we are not doing all that we can to improve the lives of more than 200 million people living in such poverty.”

“Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.”

An example of human ingenuity in the area of food production, is the work of 94-year old American, Norman Borlaug. In an age when so many genuflect at the altar of vacuous bimbos like Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, we still have in our midst a remarkable man, now unknown to most of the world, who is said to have “saved more lives than any other person who has ever lived.”

“We are such stuff
As dreams are made on,
and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”

Just as the Green Revolution transformed agriculture in the 1960s, a Blue Revolution ought to galvanize this earth into action, and everyone, from those in government to the multinationals and from the self-employed to the workforce and those at home should play a role as there is no more water on earth now than there was 2,000 years ago, when the population was less than 3% of its current size. Glib? It’s worse than that as per-capita water consumption is rising twice as fast as the world’s population.

The FAO said that two-thirds of the world’s population could be threatened by water shortages by 2025. Today 1.2 billion people live in areas with insufficient water and an additional 0.5 billion could soon face shortages. Climate change and pollution are making it difficult for southern countries to provide themselves with food. Africa has 9% of the planet’s water resources, but uses only 3.8%. Water resources on the African continent are not well-distributed. Lake Victoria, Africa’s largest freshwater reserve, fell two meters below normal in 2005.

In much of the world polluted water, improper waste disposal (in developing countries, 90-95% of sewage and 70% of industrial wastes are dumped untreated into surface waters where they pollute the usable water supply) and poor water management cause serious public health problems. Such water-related diseases as malaria, cholera, typhoid, and schistosomiasis harm or kill millions of people every year. Overuse and pollution of water supplies also are taking a heavy toll on the natural environment and pose increasing risks for many species of life. Scared yet? China, India, Saudi Arabia, North Africa, and the US over-pump and deplete aquifers at 160 billion cubic meters annually. Since it takes 1,000 tons of water to produce 1 ton of grain, this 160-billion-ton water deficit is equal to 160 million tons of grain, or 50% of the US grain harvest. 480 million of the world’s 6 billion people are being fed with grain produced with unsustainable use of water. 70% of the water consumed worldwide is used for irrigation, 20% by industry, and 10% for residential purposes. Migration to cities means that residential use of water triples due to indoor plumbing. Of the world’s water supply, 97.5% is salt water. Most of the remaining 2.5%, fresh water, is in glaciers and ice caps, unavailable for use by living things. 0.77% is in lakes, rivers, swamps, and aquifers, or in the atmosphere, or in soils and plant tissues. Only 2.5% of the world’s water is not saline. Of that, 2/3 is locked up in ice-caps and glaciers. 20% of what is left is in remote areas and virtually all of the rest – monsoons, storms and floods – comes at the wrong time and place.

BUSINESS-AS-USUAL SCENARIO Projections:

* By 2025, water scarcity will cause annual global losses of 350 million metric tons of food production – slightly more than the entire current US grain crop.
* Consumption of water for all non-irrigation uses will rise by 62%.
* Household water use will increase by 71%, of which more than 90% will be in developing countries.
* By 2025 industrial water demand in the developing world will exceed the demand in developed countries.
* Water scarcity will cause substantial shifts in where the world’s food is grown. Developing countries will dramatically increase their reliance on food imports. In sub-Saharan Africa, grain imports will more than triple. Poor countries, unable to finance imports, will experience increased hunger and malnutrition.

Water is one of the two key raw materials in photosynthesis, the other being carbon dioxide. When leaves open to take in CO2, huge amounts of water evaporates, in most climates of the order of 1500 m3/ ton biomass produced, but in poverty stricken dry climate countries often twice this amount due to large losses and low water productivity. To produce a balanced diet of 3000 kcal/ person/ day (20% animal protein) involves a consumptive water use of 1300 m3/ person/ day. This water is being picked up by the roots from the so-called green water in the soil consisting of infiltrated rainfall. Water may be added to the soil by irrigation with water withdrawn from the blue water available in rivers and aquifers. This water requirement is 70 times larger than the amount often assumed as the basic need for household supply. Even though more than 2.4 billion people got access to safe drinking water for the first time during the past 20 years, an estimated 1.7 billion people still lack it. Perhaps 2.6 billion people in the world lack basic sanitation. Two million tons of human waste is released into rivers and streams around the world annually. About 1.8 million people, mostly young children, die from diarrhea and related diseases every year. Many of those deaths could be prevented with clean water and sanitation.

A recent reading of freshwater supplies:

More than half the world’s 500 mightiest rivers have been seriously depleted. Some have been reduced to a trickle in what the UN warned is a “disaster in the making”.
All of the 20 longer rivers of the world are being disrupted by big dams.
One-fifth of all freshwater fish species in the world either face extinction or are already extinct.
The Nile River and Pakistan’s Indus River are greatly reduced by the time they reach the sea.
The Colorado River and China’s Yellow River, now rarely reach the ocean at all.
The Jordan and the Rio Grande on the US-Mexico border, are dry for much of their length.
25% of the Britain’s 160 chalk rivers and steams – such as the Kennet River in Wiltshire, the Darent River in Kent, and the Wylye River in Wiltshire – are running out of water because too much is being abstracted for homes, industry and agriculture.
Some 45,000 big dams now block the world’s rivers, trapping 15% of all the water that used to flow from the land to the sea.
Reservoirs now cover almost 1% of land surface

Does this make you queasy? Well, if we do nothing, and we, collectively, seem to be doing not much, water does not grow on trees, and in the not too distant future we’ll be forced to fight for it.

A Blue Revolution NOW is a far better alternative.