Geo Sem 2016 Final Version

CEC André-chavanne

The importance of Water

Rafael Ramirez, Jilian Lamprecht

6/5/2016

Rafael Ramirez, Jilian Lamprecht The importance of water 6/5/2016

Table of Contents

I. Introduction.

II. How can we use water more efficiently and what effects would it have?

III. How can we restore and protect water sources - Las Vegas.

IV. In which ways can we teach small local and isolated communities to better manage their water?

V. How could we improve people’s life by providing them with clean, fresh drinking water?

VI. Conclusion.

VII. Bibliography.

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Introduction

On the 25 of September 2015, at the United Nations Development Summit, Many world leaders came together and adopted the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development. This agenda includes a set of 17 sustainable development goals, or SDGs, and each goal is centered on an area of development such as poverty, education, and fight for inequality or renewable energy. For this project we have decided to look into the sixth SDG, which is centered on clean water and sanitation. This goal works on achieving clean water for drinking and hygiene for everyone by 2030, as well as other secondary objectives such as assuring that everyone has a secure water source, or teaching small isolated communities how to treat their water and distribute it evenly. In this project, we have decided to explore four different topics related to water and sustainable development. Ranging from how we could use water more efficiently to how small communities need to be taught to manage their water; So that at the end of this project of research, we can understand if these goals will be achievable by 2030 or not.

How can we use water more efficiently and what effects would it have ?

Water is vital to the survival of everything on the planet. But even though the Earth might seem having abundant water, less than 1 percent is readily available for human use.

Water represents one of the biggest problems nowadays. Millions of people lack access to safe drinking water, while those who have waste it without thinking about it.

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It seems so normal for us to have water that we don’t care about how much we use. One example could be the ice bucket challenge, an activity that took place two years ago involving dumping a bucket of ice water on someone's head to promote awareness of the disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and encourage donations to research. It was for a good cause, but if a child suffering from lack of water is shown one of these videos, he definitely won’t understand why people dump a full bucket of fresh and clean water on their head, while he doesn’t even have enough to quench his thirst…

Considering the fact that a minimum of 8 to 20 liters were used each time someone did this challenge, more than 23‘000‘000 liters have been wasted worldwide, that is enough water to fill up 9.2 Olympic swimming pools However, it’s nothing compared to the amount of water we waste every day.

Simply because of leaks, nearly 40’000 liters of water are wasted every year by an average household, an almost 4 trillion liters of water can be wasted in one year by a country like the United-States, which represents the annual household water use of more than 11 million homes.

Wasting water has a lot of bad consequences:

First, we pay more expensive bills as we use more water. So, by wasting it, we pay for water we don’t use. Moreover, cleaning and transporting water takes a large amount of energy. When this water is wasted, larger amounts must be cleaned and transported, and this requires the use of more fossil fuels and other non-renewable energy sources. The more water that is wasted, the faster these resources become depleted, and the more quickly their dangerous by-products such as carbon dioxide build up in the Earth's atmosphere.

Overuse of water in homes also reduces the amount of water for use in agriculture. If there’s not enough quantity to water plants, crop yields are reduced and the food supply for humans and for livestock is affected. Plus, the fresh water that is supplied to homes and businesses is often taken from aquatic environments in which the plants and animals rely on the water to survive. If too much water is removed from these systems and not returned in equal quantities, species become endangered.

Finally, in places where clean water is scarce, wasting water reduces the amount that is available for other people to use for drinking, cooking and cleaning. From this point of view, wasting water contributes to illness, disease and starvation.

To lessen these problems, we need to be water efficient, which means that everyone should use as much water as needed for their purpose, and not more than necessary.

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A lot of actions can be done, but here are a few examples of what we could tell to other people:

Do not let the water run while shaving or brushing teeth. Take short showers of 5 minutes maximum instead of baths. Turn off the water while

soaping or shampooing. Keep drinking water in the refrigerator instead of letting the faucet run until the

water is cool. Use short blasts to rinse dishes instead of running water Take your car to a carwash that recycles water If you have a pool, cover it to prevent evaporation When using washing machines, wash only full loads of laundry or use the appropriate

water level. Check for leaks in your toilets, faucets and hoses, and then fix them.

Almost 700'000 liters of water per household could be saved each year if everybody respected these few rules

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Another measure that can be taken concerns food. As water is involved in everything we eat, drink and wear, we also waste a lot of water by wasting food.

Here are some statistic of how much water is used to produce different types of food :

By cooking more food than we can eat, we have to throw away leftovers that have needed a lot of water to be produced.Similarly, a huge quantity of water can be saved by eating some aliments instead of others.In this way, replacing 500 grams of beef by 500 grams of vegeatables each week represents a saving of more than 350’000 liters of water annualy.As second example, drinking one cup of tea instead of one cup of coffee per day saves 35’000 liters of water a year.To sum up, there is not one big solution that can solve every water-related problem in the world. Instead, if little actions and principles are carried out by everybody, big changes can be made.

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How can we restore and protect water sources ? - Las Vegas

The USA is one of the countries that consume the most water in the world, with an average consumption of up to 1500 liters a day for a four member household. This is more than thrice the consumption per household of most of the other countries. That’s because in most cases they do not use water very intelligently.Some cities like Las Vegas are even described as running out of water. But the reality is different:

There are a lot of rumors on Las Vegas, like “Las Vegas is going dry”, “Lake Mead will run out of water by 2021”, or “Las Vegas is using more water from Colorado River than it’s allowed”. But in fact, all of these are false.

Lake Mead, Las Vegas

Even though the city consumes approximately 450 liters of water per person each day, it has become, and Vegas people insist, a model of water conservation in the American West.

Almost every single drop of water used indoors, and this all across the valley, gets transported through about 3,200 kilometers of pipe to treatment facilities, in which water is filtered, treated with bacteria that break down harmful compounds, and exposed to ultraviolet light that disinfects it. After that, it’s pumped back into Lake Mead, where the Las Vegas water district can pump it again.Thanks to this system, the effects on the lake’s level by indoor water use are almost negated.

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Changes have been brought to residences too. For more than fifteen years now, the water district has been paying people to remove the grass from their yards. (The current rate is $1.50 per square foot)

Moreover, strict standards have been agreed by homebuilders and the Water Authority for new homes:

New houses that are built cannot have grass in their front yard.

The maximum limit of grass in backyards is 50%.

During the summer, you are not allowed to water your lawn between 11 a.m. and 7 p.m. These are the times of day when the sun is most likely to evaporate water before it soaks into the ground.

The Las Vegas Valley Water District also installed computerized monitors to detect leaks in its self-contained water system. Thanks to these installations, more than 1,600 underground leaks have been detected, which have saved approximately 1 billion liters of water, which represents enough water to supply 1,800 Vegas homes for a year. Authorities have even been talking about a desalinization project.

In the end, even though Las Vegas looks like it uses a lot of water, which is true, it really cares about the amount it uses, and makes a lot of efforts to limit the waste of water, given that water is vital for Las Vegas to thrive.

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In which ways can we teach small local and isolated communities to better manage their water ?

The sixth MDG is divided into different objectives, and objective 7C aims to reduce the amount of people without sustainable access to adequate sanitation and safe to drink water by half. If that objective is to be reached by 2030, there needs to be a clear improvement to the quality and the safety of small community water supplies in both developed and developing countries.

About half of the world’s population lives in rural locations, and they are usually supplied water by “small community water supplies”. These supplies are mostly obsolete and outdated, which makes them prone to contamination and breakdown. The biggest risk of an insecure water source is an epidemic breakout, such as diarrhea or cholera. Both of these diseases cause over 3 million deaths worldwide every year, and 88% of the cases are caused by unsafe water in sanitation and hygiene.

To improve their water sources, isolated communities cannot bring in new people to upgrade and maintain them, so the only option is for them to learn manage them themselves. For this, the World health organization (WHO) has come up with a safety plan that rural communities can be introduced to easily

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The water safety plan is divided into 6 tasks that once achieved, a water source should be adequate to use by the population.

The first task, asks to assemble a water safety plan team. The entire community cannot take care of the water supply, so a few people should be chosen. The key to a good team is for the members to want to be there for their own interest, instead of just having to be there because someone chose them. Ideally the team should have members from various different backgrounds, as well as some people that have used or known the water source for a long time.

The second task asks to document the water source. The members of the team should make maps, documents and charts showing where their water source is and what path the pipelines follow. It is also important to specify what type of source it is, whether it is a surface source or an underground one. The map should be detailed and show all of the potential hazards such as factories or chemical plants as well as where the water collection or catchment areas are. With these maps the team will be able to better manage their water source in the upcoming steps.

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The third step is one of the most important, in this step the water safety team should identify all of the hazards that could harm the water, or that have disturbed the supply in the past. Some risks might be defective water tanks, torrential rain opening up paths for microbial pathogens, open defecation or simply and unguarded and unprotected source that all animals and all the population can use at their leisure.

In the fourth part the water safety plan the team will be repairing adjusting and improving its source, to overcome all of the risks seen in the previous step. The funding should come from the government, or a community budget, and in the worst case from volunteering. Some of the usual improvements seen from other communities are building fences around their water sources, and covering them if they are exposed. By the end of this step the water source should be fully protected and operational.

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The fifth and sixth steps revolve around monitoring the water source to make sure that the improvements work properly to provide safe drinking-water, and establishing a team that will periodically re-do the steps in the plan to secure a reliable water supply. With these steps the water safety plan should have been achieved.

With the plan seen above small communities can get together to improve the water for the good of everybody and many illnesses and deaths can be avoided.

How could we improve people’s life by providing them with clean, fresh drinking water?

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These statistics might seem completely frightening and unreal, but they are all absolutely correct.

It represents the sad truth of our actual world. In a society that never stops improving, there are still people who lack of the most primal needs, while some other have an incalculable amount of it.

Today, only 67% of the world’s population has access to sanitation (2.4 billion people have not), and 1 in 9 people (783 million) do not have access to clean water.

The consequences are numerous (not exhaustive):

Women and children spend between 4 and 6 hours walking for water each day instead of going to school of working

Water is often dirty and makes them and their families sick Lack of water for irrigation causes heavy loss of crops Girls give up school at their puberty because of the lack of sanitation

These are just a few examples of the difficulties of these people’s lives, but what interests us is how we can help ourselves to get through these problems.

Various organizations exist whose main goal is to provide these people with clean, safe water to ensure their basic need for drinking, cooking and cleaning. By doing this, they can completely change people’s lives, because the access to clean water in their countries could:

Improve Education

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Instead of gathering water, the children can return to class. They will have a better chance of obtaining a good employment as adults.Plus, with proper and safe sanitation, girls can stay in school through their teenage years.

Improve Health

In these countries, the leading cause of illness and death is diarrhea, which is caused by unsafe drinking water, lack of access to sanitation facilities and inadequate availability of water for hygiene. By providing people with safe water, we allow them to wash their hand, their body, and have adequate sanitation. The diseases and the deaths would therefore be reduced.

Reduce Hunger

Enough water for irrigation leads to food security. With less crops loss, hunger is reduced, and healthy food is ensured for everyone. Plus, women who no longer spend hours each day fetching water can spend time working or growing food for their family.

Conclusion

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Bibliography

https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/ - 8/5/2016, help for the planning

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https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/


http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/water-and-sanitation/ -

26/4/2016, Sanitation

http://www.unitedworldschools.org/sustainable-development-goals-sdgs-and- uws/?gclid=CjwKEAjwxoG5BRCC7ezlzNmR8HUSJAAre36jCPc54Z8nLv94rUD77g0vvl0tS_zcC9d7q2xfPRdcIhoCrXDw_wcB - 26/4/2016, SDGs for introduction

http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/75145/1/9789241548427_eng.pdf - 19/4/2016, document on water in isolated communities

http://www.outsideonline.com/2016686/water-conservation-brought-you-las-vegas - 7/5/2016 Las Vegas water management

http://www.un.org/waterforlifedecade/scarcity.shtml - 8/5/2016, what water means to people around the world

http://www.seametrics.com/blog/5-interesting-water-infographics/

- 24/4/2016, visually engaging infographics

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10932785/The-race-to-stop-Las-Vegas-from-running-dry.html - 8/5/2016, Las Vegas Lake Mead information

DONNELLAN Craig (Editor) The Water Crisis, is issues vol. 76, independence publishers, Cambridge 2004

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http://www.seametrics.com/blog/5-interesting-water-infographics/

http://www.un.org/waterforlifedecade/scarcity.shtml

http://www.outsideonline.com/2016686/water-conservation-brought-you-las-vegas

http://www.outsideonline.com/2016686/water-conservation-brought-you-las-vegas

http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/75145/1/9789241548427_eng.pdf

http://www.unitedworldschools.org/sustainable-development-goals-sdgs-and-%20uws/?gclid=CjwKEAjwxoG5BRCC7ezlzNmR8HUSJAAre36jCPc54Z8nLv94rUD77g0vvl0tS_zcC9d7q2xfPRdcIhoCrXDw_wcB



http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/water-and-sanitation/

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Geo Sem 2016 Final Version