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IBM’S World Community Grid Unveils Research Projects on Three Continents to Improve Water Quality

By admin in September 7th 2010   No Comment »
Filed Under collaboration, communications, desalination, drinking water, fresh water, health, pollution, salinity, technology, waterborne diseases, world water     Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,      

Will tap surplus power of volunteers’ 1.5 million PCs to perform computations

ARMONK, N.Y., – 07 Sep 2010: World Community Grid, a worldwide network of PC owners helping scientists solve humanitarian challenges, today announced several computing projects aimed at developing techniques to produce cleaner and safer water, an increasingly scarce commodity eluding at least 1.2 billion people worldwide.

One initiative will simulate how human behaviors and ecosystem processes relate to one another in watersheds such as the Chesapeake Bay. Other projects will explore advanced water filtering techniques and seek cures for a water-borne disease.

To accelerate the pace, lower the expense, and increase the precision of these projects, scientists will harness the IBM-supported World Community Grid to perform online simulations, crunch numbers, and pose hypothetical scenarios. The processing power is provided by a grid of 1.5 million PCs from 600,000 volunteers around the world. These PCs perform computations for scientists when the machines would otherwise be underutilized. Scientists also use World Community Grid — equivalent to one of the world’s fastest supercomputers — to engineer cleaner energy, cure disease and produce healthier food staples.

The University of Virginia Watershed Sustainability Project will use World Community Grid to power its “UVa Bay Game/Analytics” project, which models the effects of agricultural, commercial and industrial decisions on the Chesapeake Bay. This waterway is a vital estuary on the East Coast of the United States stretching 64,000 square miles with 11,600 miles of tidal shoreline, and home to nearly 17 million people. It will simulate and analyze the results of choices made by the sometimes-competing interests of fishermen, farmers, real estate developers, power plant designers, conservationists, forestry experts and urban planners. Better understanding the potential outcomes of complex, intersecting decisions can help society manage the watershed more effectively.

“Through this collaboration, the University of Virginia and World Community Grid are bringing new resources to bear to improve the future of the Chesapeake Bay,” said Philippe Cousteau, co-founder of Azure Worldwide, which helped develop the UVa Bay Game. “Responsible and effective stewardship of complex watersheds is a huge undertaking that must balance the needs of each unique environment with the needs of the communities that depend on them for survival. I’m confident that this partnership will help provide the tools we need to meet this challenge head- on.”

Another new water-related project, called “Computing For Clean Water,” is looking to produce more efficient and effective water filtering, and is now getting underway at Tsinghua University’s newly launched Centre for Novel Multidisciplinary Mechanics in China. The idea is to develop ways to filter and scrub polluted water, as well as convert saltwater into drinkable freshwater, with less expense, complexity, and energy than current techniques.

The effort will seek to reduce the pressure and energy required to force water through microscopic, nanometer-sized pores in tubes made of carbon, whose tiny holes prevent harmful organic material from being transmitted. Scientists need to produce millions of computer simulations to model how water molecules interact with one another and against the walls of these carbon nanotubes.

Although led by China’s Tsignhua University, researchers are participating from all over the world, including Australia’s University of Sydney and Monash University; as well as the Citizen Cyberscience Centre, based in Geneva, Switzerland. The project is the result of an initiative launched by the Chinese Academy of Sciences to promote volunteer participation in science. It is called CAS@home, and is hosted by the Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing.

A third initiative, to be run on World Community Grid out of Brazil’s Inforium Bioinformatics, in collaboration with FIOCRUZ-Minas, is seeking to cure schistosomiasis, a significant, parasite-based disease prevalent in tropical regions that is incubated and transmitted via foul water. The World Health Organization lists this disease as highly necessary to control. It kills from 11,000 to 200,000 people every year and infects about 210 million individuals in 76 countries. It takes a severe toll on undeveloped countries, causing about 1.7 million disability-adjusted life-years of burden annually. While the drug Praziquantel has been largely effective in treating the disease for more than 25 years, drug-resistant strains are of concern.

Researchers will now seek to identify human protein targets for possible new drug treatments. They will use the World Community Grid to screen up to 13 million compounds found in the zinc.docking.org database against 180 protein structures involved with the parasite. While this may not lead to new drugs immediately, it will greatly augment the study of this disease by scientists around the world.

IBM donated the server hardware, software, technical services and expertise to build the infrastructure for World Community Grid and provides free hosting, maintenance and support.

“I can think of few endeavors more important than making sure people across the globe have ready access to clean water,” said Stanley S. Litow, IBM Vice President of Corporate Citizenship & Corporate Affairs, and President of IBM’s Foundation. “I would even suggest that it’s a basic human right, and a hallmark of sophisticated and compassionate societies everywhere. That’s why IBM is so incredibly proud to help scientists harness the resources of World Community Grid to make strides in this vital arena.”

In the last 100 years, global water usage has increased at twice the rate of population growth. The United Nations predicts that nearly half the world’s population will experience critical water shortages by the year 2025.

Individuals can donate time on their computers for these and many other humanitarian projects by registering on www.worldcommunitygrid.org, and installing a free, unobtrusive and secure software program on their personal computers running either Linux, Microsoft Windows or Mac OS. When idle or between keystrokes on a lightweight task, the PCs request data from World Community Grid’s server, which runs Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) software, maintained at Berkeley University and supported by the National Science Foundation.

World Community Grid is also part of People for a Smarter Planet — a dynamic and intelligent network of activities, conversations and discussions in which anyone can participate to help build a sustainable and smarter world. At People for a Smarter Planet, people can share ideas, engage and discuss, or participate in one of the growing list of projects like World Community Grid.

Journalists and bloggers can also visit www.ibm.com/press/worldcommunitygrid for additional background information and supporting multimedia related to IBM’s role in World Community Grid. Or they may visit http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/

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‘Alternative Nobel Prize’ winners appeal to Botswana President over Bushmen

By Paul Stewart in September 3rd 2010   No Comment »
Filed Under community rights, conflict, drinking water, food, food security, habitat, health, heritage, livelihoods, resettlement, social structures, water security, watershed     Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,      

Survival International

Over 30 laureates of the Right Livelihood Award, known as the ‘alternative Nobel Prize’, have signed an open letter to President Khama of Botswana urging him to allow the Bushmen access to water.

The appeal comes as world experts arrive in Stockholm for World Water Week, and ahead of the Right Livelihood Award conference in Bonn, 14-19th September. It follows the UN’s adoption of water as a human right in July.

Describing the government’s actions as ‘inexcusable’, the laureates’ letter urges it to ‘allow the Bushmen access to water on their lands, and work with them to ensure a sustainable future for everyone’.

The laureates express concern for the welfare of the Bushmen of Botswana’s Central Kalahari Game Reserve, who have been banned from accessing a well which they rely on for water. ‘Without access to water, a fundamental human right’, the letter says, ‘they are struggling to sustain their way of live on their ancestral lands’.

In 2002, the Bushmen were evicted from their lands by the Botswana government and dumped in resettlement camps outside the reserve. With Survival’s help they took the government to court, and four years later won a landmark High Court ruling declaring their right to live in the reserve. In 2005, the Bushmen’s organization, First People of the Kalahari, was awarded an ‘alternative Nobel Prize’ for their struggle for their rights.

Despite the ruling, the government refuses to allow the Bushmen to recommission a well, which it sealed and capped during the 2002 evictions, forcing the Bushmen to make arduous journeys to fetch water from outside the reserve. At the same time, it has drilled new well for wildlife and allowed Wilderness Safaris to build a luxury tourist lodge with swimming pool on Bushman land. In the near future it is also likely to issue a licence for a diamond mine on Bushman land, for which new wells will be drilled, on condition that the mine will not provide water to the Bushmen.

In July, a High Court judge dismissed the Bushmen’s application for permission to use the well, expressing sympathy for the government’s argument that the Bushmen have ‘brought upon themselves any discomfort they may endure’.

Bushman spokesperson, Jumanda Gakelebone, said, ‘We are grateful to all the laureates for helping us. Khama should know that a lot of human rights activists all over the world are watching’.

The letter reads:

Dear President Khama,

We, the undersigned, all winners of the ‘alternative Nobel prize’, are greatly concerned for the welfare of our friends and fellow laureates, the Bushmen of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. Without access to water, a fundamental human right, they are struggling to sustain their way of life on their ancestral lands.
All the Bushmen want is to be able to use a well which they used before they were illegally evicted from their lands. To deny them this is inexcusable.
We urge you to allow the Bushmen access to water on their lands, and work with them to ensure a sustainable future for everyone. In the words of Roy Sesana, ‘We aren’t here for ourselves. We are here for each other and for the children of our grandchildren’.

Yours sincerely,

Ibrahim Abouleish (Egypt)
Marcos Aran, International Baby Food Action Network (Mexico)
András Biró/Hungarian Foundation for Self-Reliance (Hungary)
Carmel Budiardjo (UK)
Tony Clarke (Canada)
Erik Dammann/The Future in Our Hands (Norway)
Hans-Peter Duerr (Germany)
Samuel Epstein (USA)
Anwar Fazal (Malaysia)
Festival Internacional de Poesía de Medellín (Colombia)
Johan Galtung (Norway)
Wes Jackson/The Land Institute (USA)
Katarina Kruhonja (Croatia)
Ida Kuklina/The Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia (Russia)
Manfred Max-Neef (Chile)
Pat Mooney (Canada)
Alice Tepper Marlin (USA)
Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (Nigeria)
Nicanor Perlas (Philippines)
Raúl Montenegro (Argentina)
Juan Pablo Orrego/ Grupo de Acción por el Biobío (Chile)
Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad (India)
Right Livelihood Award Foundation (Sweden)
Mycle Schneider (France)
Suciwati, wife of late Munir (Indonesia)
Hannumappa Sudarshan, VGKK (India)
Vesna Terselic (Croatia)
Trident Ploughshares (UK)
John F. Charlewood Turner (UK)
Judit Vásárhelyi, on behalf of Duna Kör (Hungary)
Alla Yaroshinskaya (Russia)

Source and download the full letter here

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Bushmen launch appeal over right to water

By admin in September 1st 2010   No Comment »
Filed Under community rights, conflict, drinking water, fresh water, habitat, health, heritage, livelihoods, resettlement, social structures, water security     Tags: , , , , , , , ,      

Survival International

The Bushmen of Botswana have lodged an appeal against a High Court decision that denied them access to water on their ancestral lands.

In July, Justice Walia dismissed the Bushmen’s application for permission to use a well on their lands inside the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, expressing sympathy for the government’s position that ‘having chosen to settle at an uncomfortably distant location, [the Bushmen] have brought upon themselves any discomfort they may endure.’

The ruling came a week before the UN formally recognized water as a fundamental human right. It has also been condemned by the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, Africa’s key human rights body, for denying the ‘right to life’ enshrined in the African Charter.

In 2002, the Bushmen were evicted from their lands by the Botswana government; a move declared by the High Court as illegal and unconstitutional. However, despite the ruling, the government continues to prevent Bushmen from returning home by banning them from accessing a well which they rely on for water. Without it, they are forced to make arduous journeys to fetch water from outside their reserve.

The Bushmen launched legal proceedings in a bid to gain access to the well, which the government sealed and capped during the 2002 evictions. Even though the Bushmen have said they will raise the funds required to operate the well, the government claims that they need permission to do so and has refused to give it.

At the same time, the government has created new wells for wildlife in the reserve, allowed the opening of a Wilderness Safaris tourist lodge with swimming pool on Bushman land, and is due to “give the go ahead for a diamond mine” at one of the Bushman communities.

Botswana’s president, Ian Khama, who sits on the board of Conservation International, has described the Bushmen’s way of life as ‘an archaic fantasy’.

Bushman spokesman, Jumanda Gakelebone, said, ‘Like all human beings, we can’t live without water. We, the Bushmen, are appealing for our basic human right, and the world is watching’.

Source and more links here…

Visit Survival International

Read also: Q&A: James G. Workman on the Bushmen’s Fight for Water Rights and 21st Century Hydro-Democracy at Circle of Blue

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Millions of Pakistani kids risk waterborne disease

By admin in August 29th 2010   No Comment »
Filed Under disaster, drinking water, flooding, flora and fauna, fresh water, habitat, health, monsoon, pollution, rivers, sanitation, social structures, waterborne diseases, watershed     Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,      

By ASIF SHAHZAD for AP

PABBI, Pakistan — Five-year-old Shahid Khan struggled to remain conscious in his hospital bed as severe diarrhea threatened to kill him. His father watched helplessly, stricken at the thought of losing his son — one of the only things the floods had not already taken.

The young boy is one of millions of children who survived the floods that ravaged Pakistan over the last month but are now vulnerable to a second wave of death caused by waterborne disease, according to the United Nations.

Khan’s father, Ikramullah, fled Pabbi just before floods devastated the northwestern town about a month ago, abandoning his two-room house and all his possessions to save his wife and four children.

“I saved my kids. That was everything for me,” said Ikramullah, whose 6-year-old son, Waqar, has also battled severe diarrhea in recent days. “Now I see I’m losing them. We’re devastated.”

Ten other children lay in beds near Khan at the diarrhea treatment center run by the World Health Organization in Pabbi, two of whom were in critical condition.

Access to clean water has always been a problem in Pakistan, but the floods have made the situation much worse by breaking open sewer lines, filling wells with dirty water and displacing millions of people who have been forced to use the contaminated water around them.

The environment is especially dangerous for children, who are more vulnerable to diseases such as diarrhea and dysentery because they are more easily dehydrated. Many children in Pakistan also suffered from malnutrition before the floods hit, leaving them with weakened immune systems.

The Pakistani government and international aid groups have worked to get clean water to millions of people affected by the floods and treat those suffering from waterborne diseases. But they have been overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster, which has displaced a million more people in recent days.

The floods started in the northwest in late July after extremely heavy monsoon rains and surged south along the Indus River, killing more than 1,600 people, damaging or destroying more than 1.2 million homes and inundating one-fifth of the country — an area larger than England.

Some 3.5 million children are at imminent risk of waterborne disease and 72,000 are at high risk of death, according to the United Nations.
The World Health Organization set up the diarrhea treatment center in Pabbi about a week ago with the help of several other aid groups.

Workers have already treated more than 500 patients, mostly children, said Asadullah Khan, one of the doctors.

Some of the patients have been treated multiple times because broken sewer lines have contaminated the water in the town’s wells and pipes, said the doctor. “It is circulating the disease again and again,” he said.

The aid groups set up a similar treatment facility several days ago in Nowshera, a city adjacent to Pabbi that was also engulfed by the floods. Residents who have begun to return in recent days have encountered a scene of total destruction: caved-in houses and streets covered with mud and debris.

Most of the population lacks access to clean water, and mosquitoes have proliferated in stagnant floodwater around the city, raising the risk of malaria. Government help is nowhere to be found.

“It is trash, dirt, germs and odd smells everywhere,” said Zahid Ullah, whose 3-year-old and 10-year-old sons were being treated for gastroenteritis at the facility in Nowshera. “It is a big danger.”

Even at the hospitals where the diarrhea treatment centers have been set up, mobs of flies hovered around the patients despite attempts by staff to kill them.

The World Health Organization and the United Nations Children’s Fund appealed to the world on Saturday to provide water purification units, family hygiene kits and other items needed to increase access to clean water in Pakistan.

Guido Sabatinelli, the head of the World Health Organization in Pakistan, said the international community’s help was critical to help Pakistan avoid a second wave of death from waterborne disease.

“We are fearing the epidemic of disease,” said Sabatinelli. “Access to safer water, potable water” is critical, he said.

Asma Bibi couldn’t agree more. The young mother searched in vain for clean water on the outskirts of Nowshera as her feverish 2-month-old son, Ehtesham, sweltered in a tent set up for flood victims. They had run out of water the day before.

“My son is sick. He hasn’t breast-fed in two days,” she said. “He needs milk. He needs water.”

[Ed-Apols for full quote]

Source…On Google news

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Fears for Pakistani town after new flood levee breaches

By Paul Stewart in August 28th 2010   No Comment »
Filed Under disaster, drinking water, erosion, flooding, food security, fresh water, habitat, health, hunger, infrastructure, irrigation, livelihoods, mapping, monsoon, rivers, water security, waterborne diseases, watershed     Tags: , , , , , , , ,      

BBC

Officials in southern Pakistan are battling to save the town of Thatta, where the raging Indus river has breached more of its levees.

Tens of thousands of people have fled the town in the past few days and some outlying districts were reported to already be under water.

A local official said it could take up to three days to repair the breaches.

The massive floods in Pakistan have lasted for more than a month, leaving 8m people in need of emergency relief.

As the waters start to recede in the north of the country, the full extent of the damage has begun to emerge.

The UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has warned that the Indus river in the south has swollen to 40 times its usual capacity.

More than seven million people have now been displaced in southern Sindh province – one million in the past few days alone. Out of the 23 districts in the province, 19 have so far been badly affected by the floods.

Across the country, some 17 million people have been affected.

Read article… and the best graphic map I’ve seen so far the disaster

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U.S. to divert some Pakistan aid to flood recovery, official says

By admin in August 26th 2010   No Comment »
Filed Under disaster, drinking water, flooding, health, hunger, infrastructure, livelihoods, monsoon, rivers, social structures, waterborne diseases, watershed     Tags: , , , , , , ,      

By Karin Brulliard for The Washington Post

SUKKUR, PAKISTAN – The United States is diverting some of its five-year, multibillion-dollar aid package for Pakistan to flood recovery and will reevaluate plans for the remainder because the disaster has dramatically altered the country’s needs, the top U.S. aid official said Wednesday.

The floods, triggered by the start of monsoon rains a month ago, have submerged one-fifth of Pakistan, washed away entire settlements and sparked fears of unrest. More than a million homes have been destroyed. In places where schools or hospitals previously needed improvements, they will now have to be built from scratch.

“I fully envision some of the priorities will have to shift, and shift so that there’s more of a recovery and reconstruction focus,” Rajiv Shah, chief of the U.S. Agency for International Development, told reporters here.

Shah was in Pakistan to see the destruction caused by the floods, which was apparent as his plane descended into this hardscrabble city in the southern province of Sindh, one of the hardest-hit areas. Below, a sea of opaque brown water, broken only by treetops, stretched to the horizon. It cloaked the sugarcane and wheat fields that sustain the region in normal times.

Under a raging sun, homeless families and their livestock sought shade along roadsides. Thousands of others were staying at a squalid tent camp, where aid workers briefed Shah on the numbers of sick children and their efforts to teach the brightly garbed women there about health and hygiene.

“Everything, everything was destroyed by the flood,” said Baboo Shaikh, 65, who left his village near the city of Jacobabad 22 days before, a day before the water came and swept much of it away. Shaikh sat with his family of 15 in a low-slung, fly-infested tent, which he described as “congested.”

Congress passed a five-year, $7.5 billion aid package for Pakistan last year – long before the flooding – and most of it was slated for development. Little has been doled out, but USAID officials have spent months planning where it would go, including to several “signature” projects related to water and energy.

On Wednesday, Shah said that “every part of the portfolio” would have to be reexamined, although even that could not begin until the floodwaters recede and needs could be assessed. For now, he said, $50 million of the package will be redirected to flood recovery.

Read article…

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‘Water Water Everywhere and Not a Drop to Drink’

By admin in August 26th 2010   No Comment »
Filed Under disaster, drinking water, flooding, food security, fresh water, health, hunger, mapping, monsoon, rivers, sanitation, social structures, waterborne diseases, watershed     Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,      

By SIMON ROUGHNEEN for The Irrawaddy

SUKKUR, Pakistan—On the road in from the airport, the water shimmered under the moonlight as men, women and children sat in the dark, near the would-be lake shore. During the day, in the nearby river, dolphins can usually be spotted.

Idyllic, you might think. However, this dusty and ramshackle town is at the front-line of one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters in living memory.

Usually there is no water lapping at the roadside, and the only people there would be those out for an evening snack. Ramadan fast. But since torrential monsoon rain sent the Indus River spilling onto towns and farmland across Pakistan, an area the size of Italy has been deluged.

In downtown Sukkur, I spoke to Ashraf, who said he had left his family at the outskirts, before coming into town to buy some food.

“We managed to gather up some of our possessions before the waters came, but we did not have much warning. Our home is under water completely. I have enough money to feed my children for another couple of days, that is all.”

Like a few more flood victims I encountered, he had to pay three times the normal price for a bus to the city, as opportunists capitalize on people’s desperation to make a quick rupee.

Nature’s unwitting cruelty is followed, here and there, by man’s calculated greed. The last time a natural disaster hit this country, 80,000 people died in 13 seconds when an earthquake rocked Kashmir. This time, the death-toll is much lower and the disaster is unfolding slowly over many weeks. However, the impact is vast—running the entire 1,976 mile length of the Indus River from the mountainous north of Pakistan, where that 2005 quake hit, to these flood-prone plains in the south.

Everywhere, there are cases of diarrhea, cholera, skin diseases, as well as malaria and dengue—with mosquitoes proliferating amid the flood waters. Almost 5 million people now have no access to clean water, an irony seemingly lifted from Coleridge’s line “water water everywhere and not a drop to drink.”

Seventeen million acres of land are under water and, out of the mind-boggling 20 million people thought to be affected by the floods—around 800,000 people remain beyond the reach of aid workers or the Pakistani army, cut off by the rising waters that dissolved bridges and submerged roads.

This disaster is as vast as the swollen country-long lake that the Indus River has become, but the real human suffering and loss can be obscured by or sanitized into mere statistics—with people’s lives traduced by the actuary-level numbers required to account for such vast destruction.

The name Sukkur is derived from the Arabic word for intense, according to some historical accounts that date the place-name to Umayyad conquerors who marched east to this region over a millennium ago. For aid workers trying to help the displaced who are now—for want of a better word—flooding the town, the epithet seems apt.

Brian Casey worked at the forefront of relief operations in Haiti after the recent earthquake and in Burma after the 2008 Cyclone Nargis with the Irish NGO, GOAL. He said that the extent of the slowly unfurling crisis in Pakistan comes close to these massive disasters: “people are hungry, people are getting sick, and we don’t know yet how much worse things will get as the water rises in places. And at the same time, we have to think about how to help people rebuild homes and farms once the waters recede.”

Outside the city, Nizam Ud Din Bharchood of the Pakistani charity, Hands, takes me to a string of ad-hoc campsites along the highway. At one, around 30 women and children lolled under trees in the dust-infused 40-degree heat.

“Some of these people are here almost three weeks, without shelter, without regular food or water”, he said. “The men have gone into the city to see if they can get work somehow.”

Hands has been helping out with food and medicine since the start of the flood, and is partnering with GOAL to reach more people. Back to numbers again, and these are rising in tandem with the still-swelling waters, in an odd sort of danse macabre.

Four million Pakistanis are now homeless, and another 600,000 are threatened down-river in this southern region, meaning they might have to flee as well with two more weeks of monsoon rains expected.

Mohammed Ramza had less than a day to pack up with his family, and move, along with all his neighbors, to the roadside outside Sukkur.

“Our homes were destroyed, we managed only to save a few animals,” he said, pointing to a half-dozen goats sitting in the shade, their ears tugged by a trio of giggling children, none of whom are more than five years old.

Ignoring maternal admonitions to leave the animals alone, they compete to play up to the foreigner’s camera, some temporary respite from their still-unfinished ordeal.

Source

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Irrawaddy correspondent Simon Roughneen is in Sindh, southern Pakistan. He can be reached via his website www.simonroughneen.com

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EPA Releases Draft of Clean Water Strategy for Public Comment

By admin in August 24th 2010   1 Comment »
Filed Under communications, conservation, drinking water, flora and fauna, food security, fresh water, health, heritage, invasive species, pollution, sanitation, social structures, water security, world water     Tags: , , , , , , , ,      

Brett Walton for Circle of Blue

The EPA seeks stricter pollution standards and a national water quality assessment.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released a draft version of its clean water strategy on Friday and is allowing public comments on the document through September 17.

The draft document, “Coming Together for Clean Water,” outlines a broad strategy for improving water quality. The EPA plans to strengthen water pollution regulations under the Clean Water Act and complete a comprehensive scientific assessment of the country’s water bodies.

Though it lacks quantitative targets, the document suggests stricter pollution standards pertaining to the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System and an expansion of stormwater discharge permits.

Other areas of focus include minimizing loss of aquatic life from cooling water intake structures, evaluating the effects of mining on water supplies, protecting rivers and lakes from invasive species as well as reducing sewer overflows. To gain a better baseline understanding of national water quality, the EPA will also complete a series of five Aquatic Resource Surveys in the next several years.

The Chesapeake Bay has been identified as an area of particular concern because of President Obama’s Executive Order calling on the federal government to lead the bay’s restoration effort. Possible actions include stronger total maximum daily load regulations, markets for water quality trading and regulations for reducing excess nutrient runoff.

The EPA also identifies the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico as other water bodies of national significance and would like to apply a similar program in those areas.

Source

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Who Owns the Rain—When Thirsty Democracies Deny Individual Liberty to Water

By Paul Stewart in August 17th 2010   No Comment »
Filed Under community rights, conflict, desertification, drinking water, drought, food, food security, fresh water, habitat, health, heritage, livelihoods, resettlement, social structures, water security, watershed     Tags: , , , ,      

James Workman in a special for Circle of Blue

For 30,000 years Bushmen have lived in the Kalahari Desert and for eight years Botswana has tried to force them out. Recently, under a quiet policy of forced dehydration, the government declared Bushmen could no longer dig for or carry their own water.

It may seem an odd blip in a distant land, but the official ruling has implications for thirsty people in all modern democracies—including ours. It raises uneasy questions about individual liberty and limited government, namely: Whose water is it, anyway?

Water is arguably humanity’s oldest political bond. U.S. citizens may differ by age, class, race, gender, tribe, religion, or party. But we are all, quite literally, connected to each other through a vertically integrated water system that links national rivers to our household meters.

Here’s how it works. Federal laws divvy up rivers among states; state commissions allocate water to farms, industry or cities; municipalities pipe water to and from 309 million Americans. From Roman to Californian aqueducts, water unites us.

Conversely, water shortages divide us. Scarcity breeds social distrust, turns neighbors into rivals and undermines political security.

Read article…

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Will Pakistan’s Floods Take Down the Economy and the President?

By Paul Stewart in August 17th 2010   No Comment »
Filed Under disaster, drinking water, flooding, flora and fauna, food security, health, hunger, livelihoods, monsoon, rivers, sanitation, water security, waterborne diseases, watershed, world water     Tags: , , , , , , , ,      

By OMAR WARAICH for Time

The flood waters took Ehsan Ali and his family by surprise. “At first we thought that the water wasn’t so serious,” says the farmer, 44, who worked on the rice fields that stretch across Shikarpur district. “Then they suddenly made an announcement in the mosques, telling us to run for our lives. A lot of water was coming.” As the water crept across the farms of Pakistan’s province of Sindh, drowning thousands of acres of crops, tens of thousands gathered whatever possessions they had and fled.

The evacuees now languish in makeshift shelters. Many have settled on the side of dirt roads, shading themselves from the blazing sun by propping a bed over their heads or sheltering beneath a wagon. Others are clustered under a tin awning by a derelict railway station, or in similarly run-down school buildings. Doctors say they are already seeing an outbreak of scabies and diarrhea among the displaced. Women have had to go into labor in public places, giving birth in classrooms they share with other families, for example. When relief goods arrive, always from a private donation, there is a panicked scramble to gather whatever little food each person can grab within the seconds available. With each passing day, the fury at the government’s neglect mounts.

It was in an attempt to stanch that anger that President Asif Ali Zardari paid a brief visit to Sindh, his native province, last week. Setting down via helicopter in Sukkur and under heavy guard, the leader glimpsed at the devastation, handed out checks to suffering children, stroking their heads to comfort them, and then returned to Islamabad. On Sunday, Zardari accompanied U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to southern Punjab, where Ban said: “This has been a heart-wrenching day for me … In the past, I have witnessed many natural disasters around the world, but nothing like this.” Before the floods, Zardari’s popularity stood at just 20%. Now it must be at rock bottom. Over the coming weeks, if he wishes to recover his government’s standing, he will have to set Pakistan on a course where it can begin to rebuild its economy, draw billions of dollars from the international community, and help the millions affected by the waters return to their lives. Many doubt whether their president is up to the task.

Last week, World Bank president Robert Zoellick said the floods have destroyed crops worth around $1 billion. By conservative Pakistani estimates, the figure is at least double. Some 17 million acres of agricultural land have been submerged, and more than 100,000 animals have perished. On the road to Rahimabad, the carcasses of buffalo lie on the side of the road, scavenged by wild dogs under clouds of flies. About a quarter of Pakistan’s economy and nearly a half of its workforce depend on agriculture.

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TIME | Northwest Pakistan Is Ravaged by Flooding – Photo Essay – here…

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