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World Water Week: Healthy ecosystems essential to human health: from coronavirus to malnutrition Online session Wednesday 24 August 17:00-18:20

Our session will explore “Seeing the unseen: The value of water,” including climate change, ecosystems, sociocultural and economic factors along with how water scarcity, poor water quality and inadequate sanitation negatively impact food security, livelihood choices and educational opportunities for poor families across the world and, in fact, everyone.


UN Food Systems Summit Receives Over 1,200 Ideas to Help Meet Sustainable Development Goals

On April 1, 2021, the UN Food Systems Summit announced that more than 1,200 ideas and propositions to transform food systems were presented in just six months of public engagement.

Since September, the Summit has hosted regular online meetings, public fora and surveys organised around five priority objectives for more equitable and sustainable food systems.


"Water and Sanitation-Related Diseases and the Changing Environment: Challenges, Interventions, and Preventive Measures" Volume 2 Is Now Available

The Authoritative Guide to Water and Sanitation Related Diseases, with Many Revised, Updated and New Chapters, Accompanies the First Edition

Augmenting authoritative interdisciplinary coverage in the first edition, this new edition of Water and Sanitation-Related Diseases and the Changing Environment expands upon the significance of the changing environment to disease vectors, food systems and nutrition, and population, and the importance of ecosystem health to human health. Many chapters stand as they are in first edition to which readers are referred, and which are not included in this volume.


NASA Finds Drought in Eastern Mediterranean Worst of Past 900 Years

A new NASA study finds that the recent drought that began in 1998 in the eastern Mediterranean Levant region, which comprises Cyprus, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, and Turkey, is likely the worst drought of the past nine centuries.

Scientists reconstructed the Mediterranean’s drought history by studying tree rings as part of an effort to understand the region’s climate and what shifts water to or from the area. Thin rings indicate dry years while thick rings show years when water was plentiful.


NASA Satellites Reveal Major Shifts in Global Freshwater Updated June 2020

In June 2020, NASA provides an updated report on fresh water availability: "Of all of the water on Earth, 97% is saltwater, leaving a mere 3% as freshwater, approximately 1% of which is readily available for our use. The world’s population is becoming more and more reliant on this precious resource for power, irrigation, industrial practices, and daily consumption."  The report is available at: https://earthdata.nasa.gov/learn/toolkits/freshwater-availability

In a first-of-its-kind study, scientists have combined an array of NASA satellite observations of Earth with data on human activities to map locations where freshwater is changing around the globe and to determine why.

The study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, finds that Earth’s wet land areas are getting wetter and dry areas are getting drier due to a variety of factors, including human water management, climate change and natural cycles.

A team led by Matt Rodell of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, used 14 years of observations from the U.S./German-led Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) spacecraft mission to track global trends in freshwater in 34 regions around the world.


Global Innovation Exchange Co-Created by Horizon International, USAID, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Others

Horizon International co-created the Exchange alongside USAID and organizations from across government, business, academia, and NGOs who believe that together we can tackle humanity’s greatest challenges.  The Exchange is providing over 300 summaries of resources from Horizon’s Solutions Site with links to the full articles and case studies and anticipates to soon have over 600 posts from the Solutions Site’s 1,500 plus resources.  Explore resources on the Exchange from Horizon International at http://www.globalinnovationexchange.org/resources/organization/3013.

 

 

 

 

 

U. S. Land and Sea Now Protected by President Obama Increased to 265 million acres

Efforts on every scale from international to local, cooperatively and individually, are increasingly responding to this stark reality by setting aside land and regions of the seas as preservation areas which are now being protected to various extents. President Obama has taken again this past week action to invest and conserve America's natural treasures. President Barack Obama commented on the 12th of February 2016 upon designation of millions of acres in three new national monuments in the California desert to bring the land and sea he has protected to 265 million acres.


NASA Launches Pioneering Soil Moisture Mapping Satellite

"Scientists and policymakers will use SMAP data to track water movement around our planet and make more informed decisions in critical areas like agriculture and water resources," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. SMAP also will detect whether the ground is frozen or thawed. Detecting variations in the timing of spring thaw and changes in the length of the growing season will help scientists more accurately account for how much carbon plants are removing from Earth's atmosphere each year.


NASA Announces New Mission to Track Water in Earth’s Soil

 

A new NASA satellite that will peer into the topmost layer of Earth's soils to measure the hidden waters that influence our weather and climate is in final preparations for a January 29, 2015 dawn launch from California. The Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission will take the pulse of a key measure of our water planet: how freshwater cycles over Earth's land surfaces in the form of soil moisture. This data will be used to enhance scientists' understanding of the processes that link Earth's water, energy and carbon cycles.


Professor John Briscoe, Harvard University, is Named 2014 Stockholm Water Prize Laureate for His Contributions to Water Management

Professor John Briscoe, a native of South Africa, is named the 2014 Stockholm Water Prize Laureate “for his unparalleled contributions to global and local water management, inspired by an unwavering commitment to improving the lives of people on the ground.”

 


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