World Water Week: A bridge over troubled water

Sep 3rd, 2010 2:34 PM UTC
By Malaka Gharib

Before you launch into Labor Day weekend-mode, I just wanted to get one last thing on your radar: water — and I don’t mean Hurricane Earl.

Next week is World Water Week, an annual forum in Stockholm that brings the world’s leading water and sanitation experts together to discuss our planet’s most urgent water issues. This year, they’re focusing on water quality.

It’s hard to believe that getting access to clean water is still an issue. For most of us, we turn on a tap and clean water magically comes out — but that’s obviously not the same everywhere else.

In fact, almost 2.6 billion people have no access to adequate sanitation, and 884 million people have no access to clean water. These kind of figures have devastating consequences — approximately 4,100 children die each day from severe diarrhea, caused by poor sanitation and hygiene.

This forum really couldn’t have come at a better time. In a little more than two weeks, the U.N. will be hosting its Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) summit in New York City. By the end of World Water Week, you should be all brushed up on the issues surrounding MDG 7, which aims to halve the proportion of the population without access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015.

Watch UNICEF’s video from last year’s World Water Week and keep your eye out for special coverage of the forum in the media next week.

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