Commemoration of World Water Day-March 22nd

http://current.com/technology/92775254_reducing-urban-water-use-around-the-world...

Water reuse and recycling will be imperative in a water scarce urban world. Also how we get our energy will greatly matter as well. Water intensive energy sources like nuclear, coal, oil, and huge hydropower dams that divert agricultural waters ( and also displace people) will not be viable.

http://www.good.is/post/world-water-day-slideshow-everything-you-need-to-know-ab...

World Water Day and everything you need to know about H2O.

Wake Up To The Value Of Water

Water, the holy grail in the exploration of our solar system, the most
coveted of all discoveries. NASA has repeatedly placed it at the
forefront of all deep space mission agendas. We seek it out knowing
that without water there is no possibility of life. Yet here, on the
one place that provides all the water supporting all the 'known' life in
the universe, we are continuously increasing the amount of pollution
and harmful contaminates we pump into our one source of life. A 2009
study by the U.S. Geological Survey detected mercury contamination in
every fish sampled in 291 streams across the United States. This
shows the extent to which airborne mercury from burning fossil fuels
is raining down on our watersheds and entering a wide swath of the
food chain. Around the Great Lakes seasonal algal blooms are covering
the shore. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch continues to grow while
tainting the food chain of our largest ocean and we’re now facing
untold damage from an oil well that spewed into the Gulf of Mexico along with the huge amounts of chemical dispersant used to cover it up. How
long before the contamination of the northern hemisphere spreads to
the southern oceans? But more importantly, how long before we value
the water here on earth (that gives us life) as highly as we seem to
value it in the rest of the universe?

http://news.usf.edu/article/templates/?z=134&a=3236

The Water Crisis is personal.

Excerpt:

" The interdisciplinary School of Global Sustainability is a novel, interdisciplinary approach aimed at understanding water issues from the point-of-view of the people who use and manage water systems. Rather than conducting single-subject research that might solve one aspect of a problem, the school is designed to encourage students and researchers to approach a problem from many different angles to find workable solutions.
SWITCH did the same thing, on a global scale. As the European Union’s largest water project, it looked at water challenges in 12 cities around the world and engaged citizens, advocacy groups and municipal water managers on the front-end of the process. The research on potential solutions flowed from their input, making it more likely that the research was put into action rather than just left on the shelf, Vairavamoorthy said.
SWITCH’s focus is on the next 30 to 50 years and the way the world’s urban areas manage water has to change to cope with population growth and inevitable shortages of this finite resource. In large measure, the water systems of modern day cities are largely based on old systems of pumping water into cities and wastewater out that didn’t have to address the needs of explosive population growth and water shortages.
“The irony of today is we are building our systems based on those 19th Century technologies,” Vairavamoorthy said. “It’s institutionalized. It’s in our textbooks.”
The hope is that by engaging cities now, when they can plan for a day when population growth outstrips water supplies, that life-threatening crisis will be averted. The approach is being tested in Dunedin, where the Pinellas County city is now affiliated with SWITCH and is first steps in helping the Tampa Bay region prepare for an uncertain future.
Another step came just last month in Resilient Tampa Bay, a three-day conference which united local water officials with water leaders from the Netherlands who have unique expertise in managing water in the low-lying country. Given the Tampa Bay region’s geography, future threats from sea level rise, urban flooding and storm surge brought by more frequent and intense storms is a possibility that could threaten the region’s future.
And the more immediate concern for the region is water scarcity as population growth has outstripped water resources.
“We can start investing in strategies that are sensible anyway,” he said. “Trying to manage systems in a much more intelligent way irrespective of what might happen is a good plan anyway.”
His work has taken him to nearly every continent, from Africa to Central America and across southern Asia. In 2004, a tsunami hit his homeland and as the death toll across South Asia climbed into the hundreds of thousands, Vairavamoorthy returned to Sri Lanka to help.
He traveled to villages that had been wiped clean off the map by the tidal waves and every bit of infrastructure destroyed. People can survive a killer earthquake and even a massive wall of water, but they can’t go for more than a few days without clean water.
Some wells had been inundated by the tsunami’s sea water and debris, others were contaminated by bodies washed into them. The wells had to be cleared and disinfected, and then recharged.
Vairavamoorthy was led in the design of water supply and sanitation systems in the refugee camps in the northern part of the country. Knowing that he would have to leave in a few weeks, he taught young people in the camps how to use water testing systems to make sure the camps’ water was clean and other technology that could help them locate the sources of clean water.
“It was an opportunity for me to really put into practice everything I had studied and learned about, water and sanitation for people in a really difficult position,” Vairavamoorthy said. “But for me it was also an opportunity for me to work where I was from. It was my community in the northeast of Sri Lanka.
“It was a terrible event but it brought out the best in a lot of people.”
The theme for this year’s World Water Day is water for cities – not just for the 27 percent of the world’s urban dwellers who do not have accessible clean water now, but the hundreds of millions more who will join them in coming decades in the rapidly growing urban areas of the global south.
The international observance of World Water Day is an initiative that grew out of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development to focus attention on water threats as a key component of illness, poverty and inequality throughout the world. On this year’s agenda are planned discussions on how cities can create more sustainable systems that use and reuse water, and changes people’s habits and attitudes in both the developed and developing world.
“We need to realize we are going to have to do much more with much less,” he said.
“Our resources are going to likely diminish, but at the same time the demand for those resources is going to increase. Things like climate change might reduce the availability of water, but urbanization and the increase in the living standards of people is going to mean that the demand for water is going to be increased. So somehow we are going to have to work out with this very limited quantity of water we can still sustain the lifestyle we’ve been accustomed to. One of the ways we can do that is to think is how we reuse water. I take the view that all water is good water, it just has different purposes.”

cont.

Here is a short listing of water organizations I know of. Of course, as with any charity organization do your own research before donating or getting involved. However, from my knowledge all of these sites are reputable.

Water Partners International
http://water.org

Charity Water
http://www.charitywater.org

Amman Imman
http://www.ammanimman.org

Water Aid
http://www.wateraid.org

One Drop Foundation
http://www.onedrop.org

Food And Water Watch
http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org

Navdanya
http://www.navdanya.org

Blue Planet Run
http://blueplanetrun.org