The UN’s World Water Day is today, with the main event happening in Rome, including a live webcast. The home website reports:
There are 7 billion people to feed on the planet today and another 2 billion are expected to join by 2050. Statistics say that each of us drinks from 2 to 4 litres of water every day, however most of the water we ‘drink’ is embedded in the food we eat: producing 1 kilo of beef for example consumes 15,000 litres of water while 1 kilo of wheat ’drinks up’ 1,500 litres
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Coping with population growth and ensuring access to nutritious food to everyone call for a series of actions we can all help with:
* follow a healthier, sustainable diet;
* consume less water-intensive products;
* reduce the scandalous food wastage: 30% of the food produced worldwide is never eaten and the water used to produce it is definitively lost!
* produce more food, of better quality, with less water.
There are many sources for featured articles:
CNN.com has a number of offerings, including one by Barbara Frost of WaterAid, which both celebrated the MDG target of halving the number of those without access to drinking water:
The news that an additional two billion people now have access to safe water in the last 20 years is certainly a cause for celebration, but our journey towards universal access to water still has some way to go. Now is not the time for complacency.
Despite this recent progress, 783 million people from the poorest and most dispossessed communities across the world do not have access to safe drinking water. They will be the hardest to reach, the most marginalized and excluded. If context was needed for the scale of the challenge, we are talking about reaching the equivalent of over two and a half times the population of the U.S. with clean water.
The Christian Science Monitor features an interesting article by Erik Mandell of Global Envision on new technologies for purifying water.
And The Huffington Post features a helpful infographic on how much water one uses everyday.
An online search reveals many more helpful articles to keep world issues concerning water in the needed spotlight.