Celebrating World Water Day 2013

In honor of World Water Day on March 22 I wanted to give you a brief history on World Water Day. Before I do that let's look at some facts about water and the worldwide water (and sanitation) crisis:

• If you look at all the water in the worldyou'd find that:
  • 97.5% of it is saltwater and therefore cannot be used for drinking water (it could be desalinated, but this is costly and takes a lot of energy, plus you need to find something to do with all the brine, a byproduct of the process).
  • The remaining 2.5% is fresh water, however, 70% of that is frozen in ice caps, and almost 30% is locked deep underground.
  • This means less than 1% of the world's fresh water is easily accessible to humans via lakes, shallow aquifers, rivers, streams and the like.
• 3.4 million peopledie every year from water and sanitation related diseases, which is like the entire population of Los Angeles dying. 99% of these deaths are in developing nations.

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2 Answers

1. Hey Paula, I may have been a little over critical in the article. Yes, I totally think that World Water Day is a great thing and can bring awareness to people that dont work with water-related issues. It also is an excuse for people that are aware of the issues to educate others about it. I had a couple of teachers tell me that they took the day to teach their kids about water-related issues which is great! Other's told me about rallies they attended, talks they listened to, etc. The point I was trying to get across was that with this being such a HUGE issue we should be hearing more about it besides 1 day out of the year. It's a problem of priority in this society. People would rather turn on the news and hear about Kim Kardasians latest goings-on then about and important issue like this crisis...which is sad.

2. That's really interesting, thanks. In your blog post you question the need for World Water day -- after all, the issues around water are so important they should be a priority every day. Do you think that the gimmick of World Water Day can nonetheless have some positive effects for raising awareness among those who don't work on water-related problems every day?