Newsletter: World Water Day
March 23, 2011
Dear Friend,
This edition of the Global Health Policy Center newsletter is focused on global water issues because today, March 22, is World Water Day. In 1993 the United Nations General Assembly designated March 22 as the World Day for Water, following recommendations made at the UN Conference on Environment and Development that took place in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Each year on March 22 organizations around the world commemorate World Water Day by working to raise awareness of ongoing global water challenges and by articulating solutions that can make a difference for the nearly 1 billion people worldwide who do not have access to an improved drinking water source and the 2.6 billion who do not have access to improved sanitation facilities.
The theme this year is “Water for Cities: Responding to the Urban Challenge.” Urban water issues are a particular concern because nearly half of the world’s population currently lives in cities, and urban populations are growing. In developing countries, around five million people join the urban population each month. Yet at least 141 million city residents worldwide lack access to an improved drinking water source, and nearly 800 million urban dwellers lack access to improved sanitation facilities. The most vulnerable populations are the urban poor, who live in underserviced, often informal, settlements without consistent access to piped water supplies and who must pay high fees to purchase water from private suppliers, such as tanker trucks. The lack of safe drinking water and sanitation in urban areas contributes to disease outbreaks, including cholera and diarrhea.
Here at CSIS we are recognizing World Water Day 2011 through a variety of events, blogs, podcasts, and publications focused on global water challenges. On Monday, March 21 the CSIS Project on Global Water Policy co-hosted an all-day Learning Forum on “Making Progress” in addressing global water challenges with Tetra-Tech, the WASH Advocacy Initiative, and Global Water Challenge. You can find the video from the first session on private sector models for the water sector here. Podcast interviews with several of the speakers are also available here. Please check out the recommendations that came out of the four roundtable discussions we hosted on World Water Day in 2010 in our report, Paths Forward for the Global Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Sectors.
We are pleased that the Global Health Policy Center blog, Healthy Dialogues, will focus on water issues for the next three weeks. We’ve already posted entries focused on the challenge of managing city water supplies by Paul Gunstensen, the Funding Manager at the organization, Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor; Andy Narracott, Chief of Party for the African Cities for the Future program; and George Hawkins, General Manager of DC Water. Look for entries later this week on the implications of climate change for water supplies and next week on what the concept of sustainability means for the WASH sector. For our final week, guest bloggers will consider the role that women, who are often the most disadvantaged when it comes to securing access to water, can play in resolving global water crises.
Over the past few months we have featured several discussions on water and sanitation issues, as well. In February we hosted a team from the Water and Sanitation Program at the World Bank to discuss their recent publication, The Economic Impacts of Inadequate Sanitation in India. The analysis, which was based on official data from 2006, determined that inadequate sanitation costs India at least $53.8 B per year, primarily because of health costs, domestic impacts, opportunity costs, and losses in the tourism sector. This was the equivalent of 6.4% of India’s GDP in 2006. You can also listen to audio from the session and an interview with Juan Costain, regional team leader of the WSP South Asia division.
Our water working group has also hosted monthly discussions on emerging issues or approaches of interest to the water sector. In December Kellogg Schwab of Johns Hopkins spoke about the University/WASH Consortium and the important role that researchers and students at institutions of higher education can play in addressing global WASH challenges, and in January Fernando Miralles-Wilhelm of the Inter-American Development Bank discussed the IDB’s year-long regional policy dialogue on water and climate change in the Americas. You can listen to podcast interviews with each.
Looking ahead, it will be a busy period for the global water sector. Last summer the UN General Assembly declared access to clean water and sanitation to be a human right, and governments continue to consider what that means and how they will go about ensuring they fulfill these important obligations. At CSIS we look forward to hosting a discussion about WASH in Schools in the late spring and to deepening our work on urban water challenges, on sanitation, and the food-energy-water nexus.
Sincerely,
Katherine Bliss
Director of the Project on Global Water Policy and Deputy Director and Senior Fellow, Global Health Policy Center
Center for Strategic and International Studies
GHPC'S RECENT BLOG POSTS
Healthy Dialogues Blog
By George Hawkins, Andy Narracott, Paul Gunstensen, and others
With World Water Day falling in March, the Global Health Policy Center decided to make water the theme of this month's blog. The World Water Day theme this year is "Water for Cities: Responding to the Urban Challenge." We will be looking at water from four different angles: urban water challenges; women and the water sector; water resources and climate change; and Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) sustainability. We will highlight one of these themes every week for four weeks, asking different questions of our panelists.
Realizing the Right to Safe Water and Sanitation
Featuring Katherine Bliss
Katherine Bliss, Director of the CSIS Project on Global Water Policy, testified before the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission on “Realizing the Right to Safe Water and Sanitation.” Read the transcript from the hearing.
Video: Private Sector Participation in Water Supply
By Dan Runde, Elizabeth Kleemeier, Nicola Saporiti, Will Davies, and Katherine Bliss
Knowledge and innovations have been increasingly mobilized to address the global safe drinking water and sanitation crisis. New approaches are achieving success and conventional approaches are becoming more refined and widely applied. On the occassion of World Water Day, CSIS and the WASH Advocacy Initiative held a series of interactive sessions designed to share success and failures in water, sanitation, and hygiene programming in developing countries. This video captures the first panel of the day's sessions, Private Sector Participation in Water Supply.
Water Podcasts
By Juan Costain, Kellogg Schwab, Katherine Bliss, Fernando Miralles-Wilhelm, and others
Listen to various interviews from water and sanitaiton experts that have visited CSIS in recent months. Topics covered include: inadequate sanitation in India, the water and sanitation conditions in Haiti one year after the earthquake, the implications of climate change, universitites growing role in water and sanitation activies, and more.
Our Five Finds:
1.) Voice of America: Fight for Water Hits Crisis Levels Worldwide
2.) TIME: An Argument for Making Birth-Control Pills Available Over the Counter
3.) The Huffington Post: Cuts that Kill: The Senate Must Restore Global Health Funding
4.) NPR: Libya's Doctors Follow Rebels Into Battle
5.) Foreign Policy Magazine: Fighting Pakistan's Lingering Polio Problem
Our Five Reads:
1.) The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters
2.) When the Rivers Run Dry: Water - The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century
3.) Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization
4.) The Atlas of Water: Mapping the World's Most Critical Resource
5.) The Blue Death: The Intriguing Past and Present of the Water You Drink
