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.
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.
China has made progress in improving water supply and sanitation(WSS) coverage over recent decades. The WSS services include water treatment plants and pipelines, sewer networks and wastewater treatment plants, and household service connections.
We take Zhejiang province as an example.
For his Internship with Horizon International, an NGO based at Yale University, Zakaria focused on WASH, seeking stories to film from trash polluting city waterways serving as drinking water for local communities to the struggles to find potable water in rural communities. It was this search which lead him to the Ivory Coast.
During World Water Week (25-30 August 2019) in Stockholm, The World Health Organization (WHO) and UN-Water called for an urgent increase in investment in strong drinking-water and sanitation systems. They cited a report by WHO published on behalf of UN-Water that “reveals that weak government systems and a lack of human resources and funds are jeopardizing the delivery of water and sanitation services in the world’s poorest countries – and undermining efforts to ensure health for all.” The report,” Weak systems and funding gaps jeopardize drinking-water and sanitation in the world’s poorest countries,” UN-Water Global Assessment and Analysis of Sanitation and Drinking-Water 2019 (known as the GLAAS report), surveyed 115 countries and territories, representing 4.5 billion people. It showed that, in an overwhelming majority of countries, the implementation of water, sanitation and hygiene policies and plans is constrained by inadequate human and financial resources.
In 1965, the government of St. Lucia and the Rockefeller Foundation undertook what became a sixteen-year project to determine the optimal strategy for controlling locally-endemic schistosomiasis mansoni. Many of the world’s leading researchers on schistosomiasis control participated in the project, including experts in epidemiology, snail ecology, water and sanitation, social mobilization, clinical trials, immunology, and health economics. In the process, they brought infection levels in the new island nation to an impressive and steady low. Now fifty years later, the island has maintained its control of the parasite and may be on the cusp of achieving national Schistosoma mansoni elimination status.
A team of scientists went to the Western Pacific Island chain of the Republic of Palau to unlock the mysteries of species that may contain a secret of adaptation for survival. The film “Coral: Glimmer of Hope” summarizes their journey and findings to date. The Republic of Palau is a country comprised of hundreds of islands.
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.
A new modeling approach using satellite data will likely to enhance our ability to develop cholera risk maps in several regions of the globe. The model (GCRM) is based on monthly air temperature, precipitation, availability of WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) infrastructure, population density and severity of natural disaster.
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.