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"'WASH' strategy improves access to safe water and sanitation in Niger © UNICEF video A boy drinks from a UNICEF-installed well in Zabon Moussou, Niger, which supplies water for 1,750 people. By Nina Martinek As part of the launch of 'Progress for Children No. 5: A Report Card on Water and Sanitation', UNICEF is featuring a series of stories focused on achieving the 2015 targets set by Millennium Development Goal 7 - to halve  the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation. GUIDAN GAZOBI, Niger, 8 September 2006 - Access to safe drinking water is a daily struggle for the people of Niger, especially women and girls, who are responsible for collecting water for their families. As a result, girls frequently miss school and women's health is adversely affected, often resulting in low birth weight in their young children. Infant and child deaths "We have to go beyond the food availability issue and tackle the lack of access to basic services like health, safe water, hygiene and environmental sanitation, which is contributing on a large scale to malnutrition," says UNICEF Representative in Niger Aboudou K. Adjibade. © UNICEF video Women carry water home for their families from the cemented well in the village of Zabon Moussou. In rural Niger, 64 per cent of the population does not have access to safe drinking water. Many people drink pond water that is shared with livestock, is contaminated by guinea worms and registers high levels of chemicals such as fluoride and nitrates. Indeed, a majority of infant and child deaths in rural Niger are linked to contaminated water, lack of hygiene and inadequate sanitation. Unsanitary environments and unsafe water threaten not only the survival of young children but also their and physical and mental development. Illnesses such as diarrhoea cause and exacerbate malnutrition, and can result in long-term stunting. Water, sanitation and hygiene UNICEF's ob

"With one-third of the world's food now grown in areas of high or extremely high water stress, companies are waking up to water risks. But most are doing far too little to respond to these risks, according to a new study by Ceres, a Boston-based non-profit that aims to mobilize corporate and investor leadership on environmental sustainability. With water stress spreading across the globe, diversifying geographic locations is often no longer the most sensible or cost-effective response, Ceres concludes."

"Floods and drought highlight summer of climate truth Published: 31/07/2012 at 01:46 AMNewspaper section: News For years, climate scientists have been warning the world that the heavy use of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas) threatens the world with human-induced climate change. The rising atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, a byproduct of burning fossil fuels, would warm the planet and change rainfall and storm patterns and raise sea levels. Now those changes are hitting in every direction, even as powerful corporate lobbies and media propagandists like Rupert Murdoch try to deny the truth. In recent weeks, the United States has entered its worst drought in modern times. The Midwest and the Plains states, the country's breadbasket, are baking under a massive heat wave, with more than half of the country under a drought emergency and little relief in sight. Halfway around the world, Beijing has been hit by the worst rains on record, with floods killing many people. Japan is similarly facing record-breaking torrential rains. Two of Africa's impoverished drylands _ the Horn of Africa in the East and the Sahel in the West _ have experienced devastating droughts and famines in the past two years: the rains never came, causing many thousands to perish, while millions face life-threatening hunger. Scientists have given a name to our era, the Anthropocene, a term built on ancient Greek roots to mean "the Human-dominated epoch" _ a new period of earth's history in which humanity has become the cause of global-scale environmental change. Humanity affects not only the earth's climate, but also ocean chemistry, the land and marine habitats of millions of species, the quality of air and water, and the cycles of water, nitrogen, phosphorus, and other essential components that underpin life on the planet. For many years, the risk of climate change was widely regarded as something far in the future, a risk perhaps facing our children or their children. That

"Water-Food-Energy nexus"

"water"

"THEY live in stilted shacks built on a mud flat above piles of oyster shells, broken glass and rubbish, their nomadic days on the seas of South-east Asia gone forever. Liya Pramongkit, an elder and midwife of Thailand's largest group of Moken-speaking sea gypsies, saw her people on the small island of Koh Lao dying at the rate of one a week, many of them starving mothers and babies. "We have lost our traditional way of life as our children no longer hear the stories that have been handed down by our ancestors," Liya says, her deeply lined face showing the hardship the Moken have suffered since they were forced to leave their seafaring lives, where the only things that mattered were the tides, the fish, the storms, the moon and the sea spirits. "Before, when we lived and died on the sea, life was much better," she says. Advertisement More than three decades working in Bangkok's slums did not prepare Catholic priest Joe Maier for what he saw on Koh Lao when he made his first 30-minute boat ride here from the Thai fishing port of Ranong, in south-west Thailand, four years ago. "The people were literally starving to death, trapped between the modern world and the Moken world," Father Maier says. "I have never seen people as poor. "The women did not have milk in their breasts to feed their babies and everyone had [intestinal] worms ... there were no traditional values ... it was a matter of basic survival." For centuries, home for the Moken were hand-built boats called kabang which they plied through the Mergui Archipelago, where 800 islands are scattered along 400 kilometres of the coasts of Burma and Thailand, in the Andaman Sea. They lived on fish, molluscs, sandworms and oysters, accumulating little and living on land only during the monsoons. But massively depleted fishing stocks, the declaration of marine reserves and crackdowns on itinerant fishers in Burma forced them off their boats into an uncertain future where they are struggling to survive in a Th

"Beyond Food Miles Posted Mar 9, 2011 by Michael Bomford NOTE: The following article is concerned strictly with the energy equation of the food sytem and is intended to stimulate questions about how best to grow, transport, store and prepare (ideally local) foods. There are many reasons to favor local food, including supporting local economies and building local food security.      "There is nothing as deceptive as an obvious fact" -Sherlock Holmes   A locavore is "a person who endeavors to eat only locally produced food."[1] What better diet could there be for an energy constrained world? After all, feeding Americans accounts for about 15% of US energy use,[2] and the average food item travels more than 5,000 miles from farm to fork.[3] It seems obvious that eating locally will go a long way to reducing food system energy use.   Yet cracking the case of America's energy-intensive food system demands that we look beyond the obvious. A local diet can reduce energy use somewhat, but there are even more effective ways to tackle the problem. Single-minded pursuit of local food, without consideration of the bigger picture, can actually make things worse from an energy perspective.[4]   If you realize you're spending too much money, the first thing to do is figure out where it's going. Cutting back on pizza won't make much difference if you're spending most of your money on beer. Similarly, the first step in reducing food system energy use is to figure out where all the energy is going. That's what a team of economists working for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) did last year, in a report called Energy Use in the US Food System.     Where the energy goes: Energy used in the food system as a proportion of total energy used in the US in 2002.[5]     The report contains some surprises. Transportation is the smallest piece of the food system energy pie. Even farming isn't a particularly big contributor. The big energy users t

"IT'S ENOUGH TO MAKE YOU CANCEL YOUR RESERVATION A vacation is supposed to be your time away from the crazy. Remind me never to travel to any of the same vacation spots these people have booked. I'll take that upgrade and trade you a bus tour of "OH MY GOD THESE PEOPLE ARE NUTS!" - THESE ARE ACTUAL COMPLAINTS RECEIVED BY "THOMAS COOK VACATIONS FROM DISSATISFIED CUSTOMERS" : 1. "I think it should be explained in the brochure that the local convenience store does not sell proper biscuits like custard creams or ginger nuts." 2. "It's lazy of the local shopkeepers in Puerto Vallarta to close in the afternoons. I often needed to buy things during 'siesta' time - this should be banned." 3. "On my holiday to Goa in India , I was disgusted to find that almost every restaurant served curry. I don't like spicy food." I'll book it but only if I can screen my fellow travelers first. 4. "We booked an excursion to a water park but no-one told us we had to bring our own swimsuits and towels. We assumed it would be included in the price" 5. "The beach was too sandy. We had to clean everything when we returned to our room." 6. "We found the sand was not like the sand in the brochure. Your brochure shows the sand as white but it was more yellow." 7. "They should not allow topless sunbathing on the beach. It was very distracting for my husband who just wanted to relax." 8. "No-one told us there would be fish in the water. The children were scared." 9. "Although the brochure said that there was a fully equipped kitchen, there was no egg-slicer in the drawers." 10. "We went on holiday to Spain and had a problem with the taxi drivers as they were all Spanish." 11. "The roads were uneven and bumpy, so we could not read the local guide book during the bus ride to the resort. Because of this, we were unaware of many things that would have made our holiday more fun." 12. "It took us nine hours to fly home

"Water Changes Everything. charitywater "

"WATER our most precious resource Robeco Asset Management 235K views"