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Yemen's Water Woes - Pulitzer Center Untold Stories - 0 views

untoldstories.pulitzercenter.org/...yemens_water_woes.html

Yemen water environmental_education depletion natural_resources

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 02 Mar 10 - Cached
  • water crisis threatens Yemen’s long-term stability.
  • But environmental problems don’t always make for exciting news stories, and amongst the plethora of threats to Yemen’s stability, the water crisis is often lost in the background.
  • Water resources are being rapidly depleted in many countries around the world, including the western United States, and access to clean water is a common problem through out the developing world. But even in the context of worldwide fresh water depletion, Yemen’s crisis is staggering: Yemenis use about a fifth of the amount of water recommended by the World Health Organization for healthy and hygienic living; the capital, Sana’a, may be the first world capital to run out of its own water supplies; and thousand-meter wells have recently been drilled in the country’s highlands to get at so-called “fossil water.”
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  • But anyone who spends some amount of time in Yemen sees pretty clearly the daily impact that the lack of water has on people. Tanker trucks trundle down the streets of the cities carrying groundwater from deep wells drilled in the countryside; families use and reuse water for washing three or four times, and children wander the streets with buckets of water collected from the publics spigots of mosques. On a drive through the mountainous countryside at anytime of day, but especially in the morning, you see dozens of women and children walking down the main roads with donkeys and cans, on their way to find water, and you must imagine the hundreds of thousands of people across the country that spend hours each day on the same search.
  • As one foreign water expert put it to me, there won’t be an hour, or a day or even a year when Yemen runs out of water; it won’t be a headline-making disaster, but it will be disastrous.
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