Ignore This Crucial Matter, And You're All Wet

Just to let you know, this Saturday is World Water Day (noted at the Global Water Challenge web site here).

Why does this matter? Well, as noted in this Common Dreams article last month…

Water is becoming as important a strategic issue as energy in Washington. In an August 2004 briefing note for the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, a think tank that focuses on the link between energy and security, Dr. Allan R. Hoffman, a senior analyst for the U.S. Department of Energy, declared that the energy security of the United States actually depends on the state of its water resources and warns of a growing water-security crisis worldwide. “Just as energy security became a national priority in the period following the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973-74, water security is destined to become a national and global priority in the decades ahead,” says Hoffman. He notes that central to addressing water security issues is finding the energy to extract water from underground aquifers, transport water through pipelines and canals, manage and treat water for reuse and desalinate brackish and sea water - all technologies now being promoted by U.S. government partnerships with American companies. He also points out that the U.S. energy interests in the Middle East could be threatened by water conflicts in the region: “Water conflicts add to the instability of a region on which the U.S. depends heavily for oil.

Continuation or inflammation of these conflicts could subject U.S. energy supplies to blackmail again, as occurred in the 1970s.” Water shortages and global warning pose a “serious threat” to America’s national security, top retired military leaders told the president in an April 2007 report published by the national security think tank CNA Corporation. Six retired admirals and five retired generals warned of a future of rampant water wars into which the United States will be dragged.

Yes, I know this is serious, but there’s no way I’m going to add that bad Kevin Costner movie to our Netflix queue now (OK, I’ll stop)…

Erik Peterson, director of the Global Strategy Institute of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research organization in Washington that calls itself a “strategic planning partner for the government,” says that the United States must make water a top priority in foreign policy. “There is a very, very critical dimension to all these global water problems here at home,” he told Voice of America News. “The first is that it’s in our national interest to see stability and security and economic development in key areas of the world, and water is a big factor with that whole set of challenges.”

His center has joined forces with ITT Industries, the giant water technology company; Proctor & Gamble, which has created a home water purifier called pur and is working with the UN in a joint public/private venture in developing countries; Coca-Cola; and Sandia National Laboratories to launch a joint-research institute called Global Water Futures (gwf). Sandia, whose motto is “securing a peaceful and free world through technology” and that works to “maintain U.S. military and nuclear superiority,” is contracted out to weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin by the U.S. government, to operate, thus linking water security to military security in a direct way.

And part of what the Global Water Challenge is trying to remedy are issues involving water sanitation; as noted here (with an earlier related post here)…

GENEVA (AFP) - It is a subject that polite society might prefer to avoid, but in the developing world, lack of access to toilets is a serious issue that puts lives at stake, two UN agencies said Thursday.

About two in every five people still have no access to a proper toilet, said the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), warning that the lack of sanitation is putting 2.6 billion people at risk of disease.

"In the world today, there are 15 million deaths caused by infectious diseases," said David Heyman, WHO's assistant director general for health security and environment.

"If we had good sanitation today, and good water supplies, we could decrease that immediately by two million -- those children who are dying unnecessarily from diarrhea diseases."
…

WHO estimates that, on average, one US dollar spent on sanitation will wind up 9.10 dollars later.

In Peru, it cost 800 million dollars to respond to a cholera outbreak in 1991 -- far more than the amount needed to improve sanitation and thus prevent such an outbreak from occurring.

And this Dot.Earth post from New York Times reporter Andrew C. Revkin (with its intentionally messed up title from a grammatical point of view) explains a lot of the ways that we are dependent on our water supplies in particular to maintain life on this planet, with a global population expected to hit 9 billion at some point in the future.