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Mar 22, 2010

Today is World Water Day

From The Cost of Energy 

The UNEP (United nations Environment Programme) has release their report Sick Water. From the Executive Summary:

The world is facing a global water quality crisis. Continuing population growth and urbanisation, rapid industralisation, and expanding and intensifying food production are all putting pressure on water resources and increasing the unregulated or illegal discharge of contaminated water within and beyond national borders. This presents a global threat to human health and wellbeing, with both immediate and long term consequences for efforts to reduce poverty whilst sustaining the integrity of some of our most productive ecosystems.

There are many causes driving this crisis, but it is clear that freshwater and coastal ecosystems across the globe, upon which humanity has depended for millennia, are increasingly threatened. It is equally clear that future demands for water cannot be met unless wastewater management is revolutionized.

Global populations are expected to exceed nine billion by 2050. Urban populations may rise nearly twice as fast, projected to nearly double from current 3.4 billion to 6.4 billion by 2050, with numbers of people living in slums rising even faster, from one to 1.4 billion in just a decade. Over a fifth of the global total, 1.6 billion people are expected to live by the coast by 2015. Inadequate infrastructure and management systems for the increasing volume of wastewater that we produce are at the heart of the wastewater crisis.

The way we produce our food uses 70–90 per cent of the available fresh water, returning much of this water to the system with additional nutrients and contaminants. It is a domino effect as downstream agricultural pollution is joined by human and industrial waste. This wastewater contaminates freshwater and coastal ecosystems, threatening food security, access to safe drinking and bathing water and providing a major health and environmental management challenge. Up to 90 per cent of wastewater flows untreated into the densely populated coastal zone contributing to growing marine dead zones, which already cover an area of 245 000 km2, approximately the same area as all the world's coral reefs.

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