WORLD WATER DAY- MARCH-22

                                WORLD WATER DAY- MARCH-22

World Water Forum

Neelaswaram Sadasivan

Padayathra

view of the Seminar

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jiji Mathew

Kala Mala

Kavya Silpham

World Water Day is held annually on 22 March as a means of focusing attention on the importance of freshwater and advocating for the sustainable management of freshwater resources.
An international day to celebrate freshwater was recommended at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED). The United Nations General Assembly responded by designating 22 March 1993 as the first World Water Day.

Each year, World Water Day highlights a specific aspect of freshwater. For 2012 the theme is Water and Food Security.This day was first formally proposed in  Agenda 21 of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development .The UN and its member nations devote this day to implementing UN recommendations and promoting concrete activities within their countries regarding the world's water resources. Each year, one of various UN agencies involved in water issues takes the lead in promoting and coordinating international activities for World Water Day.

Sufficient good-quality water is key to the health and well-being of humans and ecosystems and an essential ingredient for socio-economic development. It is estimated that fresh water will become an increasingly scarce resource in the coming years.“Lack of access to clean drinking water exacerbates the burdens carried by the poor and the undernourished, and it increases mortality rates [...] We must join together to secure clean water and food for every citizen of the world, now and in the future,” said UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova in her message for World Water Day, 22 March. The theme for World Water Day 2012 is “water and food security”. UNESCO’s main contributions to the Day this year are the 4th UN World Water Development Report 2012 (WWDR), and the International Traveling Painting Exhibition, titled “Water”. With 7 billion inhabitants on the planet, and another 2 billion expected by 2050, the task of feeding everyone requires global initiatives.  Data from the WWDR shows that the demand for food will increase by approximately 70%, leading to an increase of at least 19% in the water required for agriculture, which already accounts for 70% of freshwater use. Improving water resource management, increasing access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation and promoting hygiene can improve the quality of life of billions of individuals, as well as reduce child mortality, improve maternal health and cut the incidence of waterborne diseases.

It is exactly for this reason that the United Nations declared World Water Day 2012, this falls on March 22nd each year, as the perfect time to highlight issues of water scarcity and its linkage to global food production. The slogan for this year’s events, these take place all over the planet on this special day, is ‘The World is Thirsty Because We are Hungry’ in the hope of educating everyone about what is really happening in the co-joined world of water and food.While having a special day on which to highlight these extremely important issues is great — it is of extreme importance to realise that paying attention for a mere 24 hours is just not enough. We must all, each and every single one of us, pay serious attention to safeguarding our water and food resources on every day of not only this year but all the years to come if life on earth is to be sustainable.At the present, there are an estimated seven billion people struggling to survive on our overexploited planet and it is a shocking fact that approximately one billion of these are already suffering from chronic hunger along with an increasingly frightening lack of access to fresh water for drinking and other purposes. The world population is expected to increase from seven billion to nine billion by the year 2050 which means, unless we all change our ways, that even more and more people are going to go both hungry and thirsty in the years to come. This abominable human suffering is all our own fault in that human-induced climate change is adversely impacting our fresh water resources and, in turn, depleting food production and environmental sustainability as a whole.

Carefully collated scientific statistics indicate that each person consumes between two and four litres of water every day and that a large percentage of this essential commodity is contained and used up by the food we eat. For example, producing as little as one kilo of beef uses up an average of 15,000 litres of water and producing a single kilo of wheat, to be ground into flour or used in other ways, uses up 1,500 litres of water. These figures might, at first glance, appear ridiculously unbelievable but when all factors are considered — the beef is from cows that need grass and other food which all need water to grow, it drinks water to survive, water is used in slaughterhouses, by the butcher and when the meat is washed at home, in cooking the meat and even in washing the dishes and other utensils used in the cooking process — the statistics begin to make sense but what does not make sense is that at least 30 per cent of food thus produced and prepared for human consumption is tossed out into the garbage bin, which is a waste of both precious water as well as of food. With at least 30 per cent of global food resources being wasted in this way, while a huge chunk of the global population starves to death, it becomes clearly apparent that the human race must make drastic alterations to the way we produce food, eat food and waste what we, the lucky ones, don’t feel like eating.The total volume of water on our heavily pressurised planet is somewhere in the region of 1.4 billion km, which sounds like an awful lot but only about 2.5 per cent of this amount, approximately 35 million km, is actually usable fresh water for agricultural practices, food processing and human consumption. And this percentage is shrinking as rapidly as the glaciers and compact snow which, until recent years, acted as frozen water reservoirs for people all over the world.

These frozen water reserves are, however and as a direct result of climate change, melting far faster than they can be naturally replenished as global weather patterns have altered drastically and seasonal rain and snowfall can no longer be relied upon.All of the above means that it is absolutely essential that emergency priority be given to conserving dwindling freshwater resources in every possible way. Agricultural water usage must be changed so that not a single drop of water is wasted, the way food is processed must be made as water-friendly as possible, water usage at home must be kept down to an absolute minimum and, this is very important indeed, we should only prepare as much food as we need to eat and none, absolutely none, should end up being tossed out with the garbage, otherwise we are simply speeding up the end of life on planet earth as we know and understand it.


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