The Water Cooler
Raising awareness about the World Water Day
Stephen H. Schoenholtz , Director
of the Virginia Water Center
On the heels of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly designated March 22 as “World Water Day” to draw international attention to the critical lack of clean, safe drinking water worldwide. World Water Day now brings to millions of people awareness of the importance of a valuable resource that is a linchpin to global sustainability. In 2007, 69 cities across the United States passed resolutions acknowledging March 22 as World Water Day.
More than one billion people (about 20 percent of the world’s population) lack clean, safe drinking water, and more than 2.6 billion lack adequate sanitation services. A third of the world’s population lives in “water stressed” countries, and that number is expected to increase dramatically over the next two decades. Among its “Millennium Development Goals,” the UN has prioritized water access because inadequate, safe drinking water contributes to widespread suffering, including increased poverty, high child-mortality rates, depressed education levels, and political instability. The specific drinking water goal is to reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water by the target date of 2015.
The importance of plentiful and safe drinking water is again reaching Virginia doorsteps, most recently because of the ongoing drought in the southeastern United States in the face of expanding demands, along with recent news about trace amounts of pharmaceuticals in many municipal drinking water supplies. These concerns increase the relevance of World Water Day to our own lives. My hope is that such concerns inspire Virginians to promote planning and management of our water resources and water infrastructure to assure long-term sustainability at the local as well as the global scale.
March 22 was a day set aside to focus public attention on critical water issues. Let it also be a catalyst for working to solve these issues. Solutions are possible, and urgently required.