HORIZON INTERNATIONAL SOLUTIONS SITE

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.

Two successful MAP projects ...are Nai Nang Village in Thailand, and the Bay of Jiquilisco in El Salvador. In both, after the initial Community-based Ecological Mangrove Restoration (CBEMR) training and restoration, the projects and conservation have been locally driven and shaped as a result of working together. 

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.

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.

Faces of Courage: Intimate Portraits of Women on the Edge, a photo-essay by Mark Tuschman documents the lack of autonomy that women and girls face in the developing world and all the efforts designed to empower them. This article is from the section on  "Healthcare Workers: Silent Heroes."

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 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.

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.