'Water for All' Concerns Raised
WASHINGTON, Aug 17 (OneWorld.net) - World leaders meeting this week are being urged to ensure that the rich/poor and urban/rural divides don't determine who has access to clean water as climate and population pressures drive the number of those living without beyond 1 billion.Global leaders are gathering in Sweden this week to discuss water and sanitation issues. Hosted by the Stockholm International Water Institute, this week-long event is being held under the banner "Responding to Global Changes: Accessing Water for the Common Good" and serves as a forum to discuss challenges and solutions to water-related issues.
Improved access to water and sanitation can have a widespread positive impact, improving health, child education, and poverty, and reducing conflict -- and important gains have been made over the past 20 years. But as the world's population grows and the competition for clean water intensifies, these goals are now threatening to drift farther away.
"Every day approximately 4,500 children die before their fifth birthday due to unsafe water, sanitation, and hygiene," says the United Nations Children's Fund. "Access to safe drinking water, adequate sanitation, and improved hygiene is crucial for infants and children to get the best possible start in life."
Some Progress on Water, Less on Sanitation
The United Nations declared the years 2005 to 2015 the international decade to take action on water. Although 87 percent of the global population now has access to safe drinking water -- up from 77 percent in 1990 -- a lot of work remains to bring clean water to the other 1 billion people. In urban areas, coverage is now over 95 percent. But only 58 percent of the population of sub-Saharan Africa had satisfactory access to water in 2006, notes OneWorld.net's Water and Sanitation topic guide.
There are also concerns that the progress being made will not hold. Rising prices and climate change could reverse the gains made in the last two decades and limit access to water for millions of poor families.
The number of people without access to clean water is expected to rise as water becomes more scarce due to the effects of pollution, urbanization, and climate change, warn researchers at the nonprofit Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, DC-based think tank. Higher levels of pollution from urbanization and agriculture will reduce the amount of clean water available, and the effects of climate change could alter rainfall patterns, causing severe droughts and floods.
The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that the number of people living without access to clean water will rise to 1.8 billion by 2025.
And progress on sanitation has been even slower, as this issue attracts only a little over 10 percent of funds available for all water and sanitation programs. From 1990 to 2006, access to safe sanitation increased from 54 to 62 percent, but 2.5 billion people still did not have proper facilities to use, most of them in rural areas.
One promising initiative is the WASH-in-Schools program, which has extended drinking water, sanitation facilities, and hygiene education to 1,000 schools worldwide over the past year. The effort has brought together nonprofit organizations, corporations, U.S. schools and government entities, and the United Nations to help turn schools around the world into centers for community health.
Water as a Human Right
In recent years, changing weather patterns, the global economic crisis, and a number of humanitarian emergencies have left millions without basic water and sanitation services. In the face of these difficulties, advocacy groups have been reiterating that access to water is a fundamental right, as it is a prerequisite for human health.
"The world is facing increasing crises, many of which are intensifying competing demands for water in most regions of the world," says Jan Eliasson, the chair of the Sweden-based advocacy group WaterAid. "Already, billions of the world's poorest people are affected by the water and sanitation crisis. As a global community, we must ensure that concerted action is taken."
Access to clean water is not included in the original Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In 2002, the UN Committee on Economic, Cultural and Social Rights recognized providing access to water and sanitation as a goal for signatory countries, but not a universal obligation.
Universal access to water has benefits beyond reducing the rates of disease, explains the U.S.-based ONE campaign: "When water is unavailable, tensions grow both within and among nations, and water scarcity has contributed to political unrest in Sudan and other countries. Lack of water also has educational ramifications.... Girls may often drop out of primary school because their schools lack separate toilets and easy access to safe water."
Tens of thousands of advocates have urged U.S. lawmakers to support a bill that would provide 100 million people worldwide access to clean water and sanitation by 2015. The Durbin-Corker "Water for the World" act will target developing countries to improve access and affordability.
Investment efforts should be focused on simple, affordable, and effective interventions, argues the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). For example, providing facilities and teaching children to wash their hands with soap and water can help reduce deaths from diarrhea by up to 47 percent.
"Safe water and good sanitation are essential to poverty reduction and good health," explains Nigel Ede, an IFRC staff member in Indonesia. "But when you compare international funding, remarkably little is spent on clean water and sanitation."
The other side of water scarcity is water management. Many advocacy groups fear that as water becomes more precious, it will be reserved for the world's wealthy population.
"With water availability expected to be one of the major and most severe impacts of climate change in many areas of the world, sufficient and equitable allocation of water will become more and more vital for both people and nature," warns the environmental watchdog group WWF.
- This article was compiled by Brittany Schell.
The Wolf And The Polar Bear
by Jonathan Hiskes1 May 2009 - On Monday, gray wolves in Montana, Idaho, and parts of other northern states leave the endangered species list, designated as an officially “recovered” species. Once driven nearly to extinction, the wolves will fall under the watch of state management—which includes hunting—following the Obama Interior Department’s decision in March to sign off on a delisting process put in motion on George W. Bush’s watch.
Later in the week, the legal status of polar bears will become clearer when the Obama administration must decide whether to overturn a last-minute Bush move that denied the arctic mammals key protections under the Endangered Species Act. Acknowledging that the polar bear is threatened by a melting habitat, Bush officials still ruled that endangered species protections cannot apply to causes originating outside of their habitat (in other words, the greenhouse gas emissions heating up the polar regions). Obama has until May 9 to overturn the decision; otherwise, it stands.
Two different species located in very different places—what’s the connection?
The wolf story is a chapter in the environmental movement’s decades-long efforts to protect specific species and eco-systems—a campaign descended directly from “save the whales” and “stop the logging.” Protecting the polar bear, however, is all about confronting the existential threat of global warming.
Wolf, meet bear. When it comes to saving the planet, you’re just a sideshow.
A political decision?
Gray wolves are a classic “old environmentalism” problem. Humans threatened the species in a very localized way: they shot too many wolves and settled in their habitat. Local ecosystems were disrupted, and when the federal government introduced a Rocky Mountain recovery plan in 1995, it tried to balance the interests of local parties, such as cattle and sheep farmers. Environmentalists fought for stronger protections through their long-preferred method—lawsuits. This continues: a coalition led by Earthjustice will sue to overturn the wolf decision in June, once a 60-days-notice requirement has been met.
For years the Bush administration sought to remove wolves from the endangered species list, and wolf advocates twice blocked the move in court. When Interior Secretary Ken Salazar upheld the Bush policy in March (it had been put on hold by the new administration), it was like, well, upholding a Bush environmental policy—exactly the opposite of what many in the environmental community expected.
In public and private statements, Interior officials have framed wolves’ resurgence as a success story— what the Endangered Species Act intended. They cite the wolf population across the Northern Rockies—about 1,600, including about 100 breeding pairs—and evidence that wolf packs in three distinct areas (Yellowstone ecosystem, central Idaho, and northwest Montana) have enough contact to interbreed and ensure genetic diversity.
“The population has really come back from the brink,” said Seth Willey, a Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) regional recovery coordinator in Denver. “There’s been scientific consensus on this for a long time.”
The delisting hinges on management plans submitted by the states. Montana’s and Idaho’s plans were approved, though the department rejected Wyoming’s trigger-happy plan [PDF] as inadequate, so wolves will remain federally protected in that state.
Wildlife groups find the Montana and Idaho plans nearly as troubling; Idaho, in particular, would allow hunters to reduce the current population to 104 animals, down from a current count of 778. Idaho Gov. Butch Otter (R) famously said he would be first line for a wolf hunting license.
“We’ve made all this progress,” said Noah Greenwald, a conservation biologist at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Instead of continuing with that and ensuring the wolves recover to a larger area of their historic range, we’re going to shut the door and allow them, particularly Idaho, to reduce their population to the point where it’s questionable they’re going to be viable.”
Suzanne Stone, an Idaho field conservationist for Defenders of Wildlife, a leading wolf advocacy group, questioned whether the Rocky Mountain populations are sufficiently connected, as FWS claims. She said federal recovery goals are based on an outdated 1987 plan [PDF].
“Since that time, wildlife scientists have repeatedly warned that the original wolf recovery goals were set too low and in order to reach a recovered metapopulation, the northern Rockies wolf population needs to be much larger than a few hundred wolves,” she wrote in an email. “... Genetic scientists have also confirmed that when our regional wolf population reached 450 wolves region wide (the current requirement for delisting), the wolf population was still disconnected and not functioning as a metapopulation by providing genetic connectivity between all three subpopulations.”
The Interior Department maintains its plans are based on the best available science. The government’s recovery findings were detailed in the Federal Register on April 2, written largely by wolf recovery architect Ed Bangs. Further, said spokesperson Hugh Vickery, the Endangered Species Act compels a species to be delisted when it has recovered, meaning Salazar’s decisions was less a judgment call than a requirement.
“How the decision is made is clearly spelled out in the law,” Vickery said. “If the best available science says to do it, we have to do it.”
The department’s handling of the announcement didn’t win it any friends. Wildlife groups that had worked on the issue for years resented being caught off guard by the announcement.
“It’s too soon to pass judgment on how [Salazar] will ultimately do as secretary, but certainly it was a warning flag that more needs to be done to arrive at these decisions carefully, that more communication needs to occur,” said Bob Irvin, the senior vice president for wildlife at Defenders.
Congressional supporters of continued protections also felt left in the dark on announcement. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) wrote to Salazar asking him to delay the effective date (he did not). She also questioned whether the Endangered Species Act allows the department to single out a particular area—Wyoming—for continued protection, a point Defenders of Wildlife also raises.
A staff member for Rep. Norm Dicks (D-Wash.), another longtime wolf advocate, said simply that Dicks found the announcement unexpected, disagreed with it, and had spoken to Salazar about it.
Defenders of Wildlife filed a Freedom of Information Act request for documents showing whether Salazar looked at any new research before making the “scientifically flawed” decision. It’s awaiting a response, Irvin said.
“We’re very disappointed in the [wolf] decision, but it’s way too early to draw any lines between it and future administration actions,” said Andrew Wetzler, endangered species project director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “This is a bad decision among a number of good decisions.”
Polar bears and the climate fight
Unlike gray wolves, the threat to polar bears’ habitat isn’t local. It won’t be fixed with a regional management plan, which can’t address greenhouse gases from tailpipe emissions in Los Angeles or coal plants in India. It won’t be fixed with a typical lawsuit—wildlife advocates can’t litigate a national (or global) climate change plan into existence.
True, polar bears are furry and loveable (from a distance!), and much like wolves inspire awe at nature’s untamed predators. Like wolves, they require protection from local habitat destruction. But polar bears have become the poster-species for the issue that defines the new environmental movement—one that concerns itself less with charismatic species than with the tremendous disruption to human life that climate change will bring.
On its surface, the wolf delisting puts President Obama in an awkward spot—upsetting a key plank in the Democratic platform—environmental voters—and complicating the clean break he’s tried to make from Bush’s environmental policies. The political sensitivity of the decision was made clear by the fact that Salazar’s announcement back in March came on a Friday afternoon, the classic time for downplaying unpopular news, and was issued with no comment from the White House.
But if the White House upholds the Bush decisions on wolves, it may show that Obama is making a political calculation. The president’s selection of Salazar, a Colorado senator with a fairly strong environmental record and deep family ties to ranching, can be seen as a signal of the president’s belief that it’s more important to mediate culturally charged western states issues like wolves and save political ammunition for the bigger challenge—enacting a comprehensive strategy for combating climate change.
“The science makes it so clear that the polar bear is threatened by greenhouse gas emissions, and it’s such a well-known species, that they should be considering rescinding [the Bush-era rule]. I think it’s still possible they will,” said Greenwald of the Center for Biological Diversity.
Overturning the Bush exception, Greenwald said, could lend additional weight to efforts to strengthen auto-efficiency standards and block offshore drilling and oil shale development.
Interior Department Press Secretary Kendra Barkoff said the department had not yet decided on the polar bear rule. A decision must come by next Saturday.
GRIST
An Open Letter To Plastic
By Karen Murphy01/31/2009 - Please go away. Even though you are now everywhere—including in water containers, food wrapping, baby toys, household appliances and electronics, and even in our clothing—the love affair is over. And we're not sorry. No, you've crossed the line. We've heard all that talk about BPA, the poisonous #7 polycarbonate plastic that's in baby bottles, plastic dishes and cups, can linings, and water bottles. We've learned that #7 is an endocrine disruptor linked to breast cancer, infertility, obesity and early puberty. In fact, it's in 97% of us.
We are fed up. You have to go. Especially #3 PVC, #6 Polystyrene, and #7 "Other" (Polycarbonate, mostly). You know who you are.
No, it won't be easy. You've become part of our lives. We've grown dependent on you. But we can't trust you anymore.
We've found someone else. And we can do so much better than you:
Wood or bamboo cutting boards instead of plastic.
Stainless steel water bottles instead of plastic.
Glass, ceramic, and Pyrex food containers instead of plastic.
Waxed paper instead of plastic wrap.
Wooden spoons and cooking utensils instead of plastic.
Stainless steel bento boxes instead of plastic lunch boxes.
Frozen concentrate juice instead of ready-to-drink juices packed in plastic.
Natural fibers like organic cotton and wool instead of plastic fleece and polyester.
Goodbye, Plastic. We're not sorry to see you go.Love, The Earth.