Illustration by Joelle Bolt
Wanted: Water Equality
The global water crisis is the greatest health threat in the worldCan you turn on a tap in your home, pour yourself a full glass of clean, fresh water and take a sip? If so, you are enjoying a great luxury.
Three billion people do not have access to running water within a kilometer of where they live.
Worse, every year 3.5 million people die because of contaminated water, according to the World Health Organization. That’s a greater human toll than war, terrorism and weapons of mass destruction combined. Four thousand children die every day because they do not have access to clean water. Eighty percent of all illnesses and deaths in the southern hemisphere are directly related to dirty water. At present, one in three Africans lacks access to clean water; by 2025, this number will rise to one in two.
My personal odyssey has led me from the poorest slums on earth to the halls of the United Nations in a quest to solve the global water crisis. Quite simply, we have taken for granted the exquisitely small amount of available fresh water upon which all life depends, and used it for our wealth, enjoyment and profit. We have failed to see water as the essential component of a living ecosystem and mined, piped, polluted and dumped it with no thought for the consequences and no understanding that the supply could run out. Now people are taking knives and axes to one another in the competition for dwindling local supplies.
The world must address this crisis now. There are solutions but they need collective will. We must totally change our relationship to water and treat it as the life-giving gift that it is, living our lives around its reality, sharing it in a totally different way than we do today.
A water-secure future will be based on three fundamental principles:
- Watershed preservation, restoration and conservation.
- The equitable sharing of water based on the understanding that water is a shared resource, a public trust and a human right.
- Environmental peacemaking, whereby we see water, not as a source of conflict, but as nature’s gift to teach us how to live with one another in peace and tread more lightly on the earth.
Recently, I spoke at a conference of young North American doctors who were all committed to working with the poor in the developing world. I told them that the most important thing they could do, more than opening clinics and ministering to the sick, was to help us implement solutions to water equity problems. Further, I told these young idealists, increasingly it is about money: if you have it, you can buy all the water you want no matter where you live, for swimming pools, golf courses, to wash your car and water your lawn. If you do not have it, you watch your children die of diseases we thought we had conquered decades ago.
Author Bio:
Maude Barlow served as Senior Advisor on Water to the 63rd President of the UN General Assembly and is the author of Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water.
Photo: Illustration by Joelle Bolt
