Water water, dirty water, fuel for war
Global forum seeks to avert water crisis
Nearly half of the world’s people will be living in areas of acute water shortage by 2030, the United Nations warned last week, and an estimated 1 billion people remain without access to safe drinking water and sanitation.
The world’s population of 6.6 billion is forecast to rise by 2.5 billion by 2050. Most of the growth will be in developing countries, much of it in regions where water is already scarce.
As populations and living standards rise, a global water crisis looms unless countries take urgent action, the international body said.
“Water is not enough of a political issue,” said Daniel Zimmer, associate general of the World Water Council, one of the organizations behind the World Water Forum.
“One of the targets is to make politicians understand that water should be higher up on their domestic agenda and care that it is a necessity for the welfare, stability and health of their populations.”
Because of the lack of political attention, hundreds of millions of people remain trapped in poverty and ill health and exposed to the risk of water-related disasters, the U.N. warns. 
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has said water scarcity is a “potent fuel for wars and conflict.”
Water forum seeks way through worsening crisis Around 20,000 people are expected for the Fifth World Water Forum in the Turkish city of Istanbul, where a charged agenda awaits them.
Access to clean water and sanitation, river pollution, madcap extraction of aquifers, jockeying for water rights and the impact of climate change have turned the stuff of life into a fiercely contentious issue.
In 348 pages, their document, published last Thursday, warned of a triple whammy in which supplies of freshwater were being viciously squeezed by demographic pressure, waste and drought.
It spoke of a “global water crisis” with plenty of potential for instability and conflict.
Loic Fauchon, head of the World Water Council which is organising the Istanbul meeting, said the facts amounted to a glaring message that times have changed.
Less visible, but also massively destructive, is over-irrigation, in which water is used to grow thirsty crops in scorching climates and soils that are naturally parched. California’s Imperial Valley and Australia’s Murray-Darling river system are often cited for such waste.
Then there is the damming of rivers for hydro-electric projects, which affects flows downstream, and the frenzied extraction of “fossil water” — underground aquifers that took hundreds of thousands of years to build up.
Amplifying the problem is climate change, affecting patterns of rainfall and snowfall.
Water scarcity has the potential to stoke unrest, frictions within countries and conflicts between states, according to the UN document, the Third World Water Development Report.
“Conflicts about water can occur at all scales,” the report warned.
“Hydrologic shocks that may occur through climate change increase the risk of major national and international security threats, especially in unstable areas.”
‘More must be done’ to protect water during wartime“Water, sewage and electrical power systems, along with medical facilities, are usually the first things to be disrupted when a war
breaks out,” Robert Mardini, head of the ICRC’s water and habitat unit, said in a written statement.
Opportunity for salvaging the future for humanity is passing at a faster rate every day. Drinking water loss is not related to anything but wasteful human behavior. Education, politics and corporate inattention has failed the human race. Ideologies of religion have failed their gods creation. Creatures of self importance have doomed themselves and everyone else to suffer through a crisis of water. Oceans are saturated with poisons and litter that corrupt the food chain. Arable land has been dumped on with toxic trash that ultimately seeps into the water tables around the world. Poor countries, without resources, allow human waste to stream down streets and become the sidewalks for children. Military organizations around the world, freely, and under government protection, dump their toxic materials into classified sites … out of sight, out of mind. Biological materials, poisons, fissionable and toxic sludge have been trusted to military crews who have not even been told what they are handling. That is classified. If it stinks … bury it! Don’t let civilians find out! Transport it across the country in secret. What they (civilians) don’t know, won’t hurt them.
That philosophy, “out of sight, out of mind” has come back to threaten the entire world. Oooops, we don’t have drinkable water any more, Hmmmm, lets fight a war, just like we did over OIL!
TruthHugger 
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