Without water there is no life.

Following are a few interesting links in honor of World Water Day, 22nd of March.

UN-Water has chosen "Clean Water for a Healthy World" as theme for World Water Day 2010. The overall goal of the World Water Day on 22 March 2010 campaign is to raise the profile of water quality at the political level so that water quality considerations are made alongside those of water quantity. There will be a live webcast on Water for Life, 2005-2015 from the UN today from 9am-5pm.

According to The 2010 report on Water Supply and Sanitation by WHO / UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) for Water Supply and Sanitation the world is not on track to meet the MDG sanitation target: 2.6 billion people still lack access to improved sanitation, including 1.1 billion who practice open defecation. The world is on track to meet the MDG drinking-water target. However, 883 million people do not use an improved source of drinking-water. And for the data: http://www.wssinfo.org/datamining/introduction.html

Charity Water breaks this message down via video:
Right now, almost a billion people on the planet don't have access to safe, clean drinking water. That's one in eight of us. They made a music video out of it with Beck on the soundtrack. http://www.charitywater.org/whywater/. Definitely check this out.

Millions of women and children spend several hours a day collecting water from distant, often polluted sources. According to Water Advocates, a Washington DC based group, women in poor communities across Asia, Africa, and South America typically walk an average of 3 miles a day to fetch water for their households, often from contaminated sources such as rivers, unprotected springs, and shallow wells, and yet women play an important role in water management. They are most often the collectors, users and managers of water in the household as well as farmers of irrigated and rain fed crops. http://www.wikigender.org/index.php/Women_and_Water:_The_Forgotten_Glass_Ceiling

3.575 million people die each year from water-related disease according to World Health Organization. 2008’s report: Safer Water, Better Health: Costs, benefits, and sustainability of interventions to protect and promote health.

For OECD data on water consumption: http://www.wikiprogress.org/index.php/Water_Consumption

And finally, oldie but a not-so goodie actually:


From World Vision.

Wikiprogress needs more articles and data on the state of the world’s water and access to it. Please log in to wikiprogress.org to contribute your knowledge on the topic and join the Global Project for Measuring the Progress of Societies. Information on the world’s water is vital. Help wikiprogress to gather it.