On World Water Day I quote an article from GREEPEACE:
World Water Day is an initiative of the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED). This year the day's motto is:
! Clean water for a healthy world!
The United Nations would like to use this day to encourage governments, companies and everyone around the world to take an active role in preventative protection of water quality.
The problem is becoming more and more pressing: increasing drought in many areas, especially in Africa and Asia, is threatening biological diversity. More than a billion people do not have access to clean drinking water and have to obtain it from polluted springs, wells, ponds or rivers.
To date, almost half of the world's population has no sanitation or wastewater disposal: diarrheal diseases are one of the most common causes of death in children under the age of five. Contaminated drinking water and unhygienic living conditions are the cause of epidemics such as cholera, dysentery, campylobacter and typhus.
The millennium goal of enabling twice as many people to have proper wastewater disposal by 2015 will be missed by around a billion people.
Do business sustainably
But there hasn't been much movement in people's minds yet. Water continues to be thoughtlessly wasted. World water consumption increased approximately sixfold between 1930 and 2002, although the UN estimates that the world is heading towards a dramatic water shortage.
There are many examples of waste: the mining of brown coal leads to an incredible waste of drinking water and serious ecological damage. In order to extract brown coal, the groundwater level must be lowered. The catastrophic consequences: large-scale lowering of groundwater, difficulty in obtaining drinking water, soil subsidence and severe damage to plants and wildlife. During oil production, drinking water is contaminated with chromium, salt, cyanide, nickel, cadmium, boron, strontium, barium, arsenic and lead. Industrial wastewater and the use of fertilizer in agriculture pollute rivers and lakes with pesticides and heavy metals, depriving plants and animals of their livelihoods. Already 40 percent of the water surface, especially the North Sea, the Eastern Caribbean and the East China Sea, is polluted by humans.
Greenpeace has been actively committed to protecting waters for decades. The environmental organization fought for years to have Lake Baikal declared a world cultural heritage site. This was successful in 1996, but today a Russian pulp factory is again discharging unfiltered wastewater into Lake Baikal and is therefore primarily responsible for its pollution. The factory was initially closed due to environmental concerns, but a new Russian government regulation will allow toxic waste to be dumped and burned around the world's largest freshwater lake..
Water as a resource must finally be used sustainably. Only then can ecosystems be kept alive.
https://www.greenpeace.de/engagieren/nachhaltiger-leben/heute-weltwassertag
