A drop of Life - 2nd place of the International Photo Contest "Water is life" 2003

Ali Isik (Turkey)

On 22 march, World Water Day 2007: ‘Coping with Water Scarcity’.

The world’s water crisis has many faces.

• A girl in Africa walks three miles before school to fetch water from a distant well.
• A teenage boy in China is afflicted with terrible skin lesions because his village well is contaminated with arsenic.
• Impoverished slum dwellers in Angola draw drinking water from the local river where their sewage is dumped.
• Farmers on the lower reaches of the Colorado River struggle because water has been diverted to cities like Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

According to the United Nations, every day 4,400 children under the age of 5 die around the world, having fallen sick because of unclean water and sanitation. In fact, five times as many children die each year of diarrhea as of HIV/AIDS.

• 2.6 billion people lack basis sanitation
• 1.1 billion people have no access to safe water
• 1/3 of the world's population face water scarcity

Why is this so?

Access to water is mainly a crisis for the poor. More than two-thirds of those without clean water survive on less than $2 a day. Either poor people are excluded because of a lack of legal rights to claim adequate water, or they fall outside the scope of limited water infrastructure that serves largely the rich.

Water is also a crisis for women and children, because they bear the burden of collecting water. In some places, women have to walk nearly 10 kilometers to reach a water source. Girls drop out of school either because they have to help fetch water or because there aren’t adequate sanitary facilities in school toilets. Millions of school days are lost as a result.

Water scarcity affects some parts of the world more than others. Today, 800 million people live under a threshold of “water stress.” As rivers dry up, lakes shrink and groundwater reserves get depleted, that figure will rise to 3 billion in 2025, especially in parts of Asia and Africa. There is an urgent need to reduce waste and invest in infrastructure to “harvest” rainwater or increase storage.

Most water use is in agriculture. Farming uses up to 70 times more water than is used for cooking and washing. Many countries have to import more than half their food needs because they do not have enough water to grow more food. If we do not change the way we use water, the amount needed for a rapidly growing world population will double in the next 50 years.

But the water crisis hits cities in the rich world as well — Houston and Sydney, for example, are using more water than is replenished. Australia is the world’s driest continent, where increasing salinity in water is threatening agriculture. Large parts of Europe are affected by recurring droughts.

Global warming is another threat. It will be responsible for declining rainfall in some regions, glacial melt in others, and rising sea levels.

The United Nations declared has 2005-2015 as the ‘Water for Life’ decade. The goal is to reduce by half the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water by 2015 and to stop unsustainable exploitation of water resources. Governments pledged to do this when they adopted the Millennium Development Goals in 2000.


Watch the ‘Water, Drop of Life' Video of the Decade and discover the issue: http://webcast.un.org/ramgen/specialevents/waterforlife-eng.rm

French version: http://webcast.un.org/ramgen/specialevents/waterforlife-fre.rm