Relieving the water crisis

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verte76

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STOCKHOLM, Sweden (Reuters) - Simple innovations such as recycling household water and fixing leaky pipes would bring safe drinking water to hundreds of millions of people lacking it today, politicians and scientists said Tuesday.

More than 1.2 billion people lack access to clean water, according to the United Nations, and 12 million die of diseases caused by poor water quality each year, said speakers at World Water Week, an annual gathering of some 1,200 water experts from 100 countries.

A U.N. action plan aims to halve the number of people lacking access to clean drinking water and tolerable sanitary conditions by 2015, but little progress has been made so far.

"There are people in the semi-arid and arid areas who still have to walk about 10 hours looking for water. That situation is totally unacceptable," Martha Karua, Kenya's minister of water resources, told Reuters.

"Kenya is a water-scarce country, but I believe that with efficient management of our water resources we can use the available water resources for the benefit of everybody and to cover all our needs," Karua said in an interview.

She said rebuilding Nairobi's crumbling water infrastructure with leaking pipes would cost over $80 billion, but much also needed to be done to eradicate corruption and misuse.

"In Nairobi around 40 percent of the water is unaccounted for," Karua said.

"It is estimated that there are around 4,000 water vendors licensed by the Nairobi City Council. What is amazing is that very few of these have any known water source which means basically that we are licensing people to vandalize the system."

Providing safe drinking water and sanitation would also save money from health budgets by freeing hospital beds from those suffering from water-borne diseases and prevent epidemics.

"SARS developed in an area where there was virtually no sanitation available and no safe drinking water, and it affected both the people there but also people living in Canada and the world economy," said Peter Wilderer, professor at the Technical University of Munich.

Wilderer has studied recycling household water and said the technical innovations to cut water use dramatically are already there.

"This is not an academic exercise. Many large industrial firms have realized this is the market of the future," he said.
 
WATER IS AND WILL REMAIN TO BE THE TOP PROBLEM IN THIS WORLD...

THE ISSUE ON WATER IS ALSO PROBABLY THE MOST UNDERESTIMATED CONFLICT.
 
I have heard it argued that the next world war will be over water.

To be honest, when you live in a place like Canada, which if I'm not mistaken has the largest freshwater reserves in the world, you don't think about it that much, sadly.
 
The fact is this world has the technology to provide the world with clean water. We have technology in the residential market that would allow people to store and use "gray" water for vegitation, toilets, etc. and save 1000's of gallons of clean water. We have the technology on small city scales to turn ocean water into clean water by evaporating and removing the salts. The technology is there. It's a matter of countries who aren't in a true water crisis to make the right moves, and refine and implement these systems, and find a way to bring water to the countries who do have a true shortage. This planet is some 75% water. If we ever had a war based on water, then humanity has truly become the greedy incompassionate race I've always feared they'd become.
 
It's scary because so much :censored: happens when people don't have access to clean water. It's horrible. Two years ago I myself had no idea just how much disease and suffering happens when people are forced to use unclean water.
 
The Tigris River has been fought over
South East Asian states are fighting over water...
Israel has the power to cut off water supply to the West bank (which they have done numerous of times).

The conflict of water goes on... I wouldnt' be suprised if the next war was over water.

Also, w/o water, states become impoverished, thus raising poverty.. Children exposed to poverty lose hope of life... thus agression is taken out in so many ways...
we see this example in Southeast Asia, Pakistan, India, and many other countries... when these children are living in poverty, extremists house and take care of these children in exchange of implementing agression towards "agressors"...

So, I truly believe that the lack of water is the root problem to many conflicts...
 
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