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All You Need To Know About World Water Day
Yesterday (March 22nd) was World Water Day 2018, 24 hours set aside to focus attention on the importance of water, with this year’s theme Nature for Water – an exploration of nature-based solutions to the challenges that we face on a global scale in the 21st century.
Sustainable Development Goal 6 has committed the world to making sure that every single person has access to safe water by the year 2030 – but as of now, there are 2.1 billion people who live without this at home, affecting not only their health but their education and livelihoods as well.
United Nations secretary-general Antonio Guterres has warned that growing demands, climate change and poor management have seen water stresses and water scarcity increase, and become a huge problem in some parts of the world – and come the year 2050, at least one in four people will be living in a country where a lack of fresh water is either “chronic or recurrent”.
He went on to say that water simply can’t be taken for granted anymore and although there are technologies and solutions in place to improve water management, these aren’t always accessible to all. “As with most development challenges, women and girls suffer disproportionately. For example, women and girls in low-income countries spend some 40 billion hours a year collecting water,” the expert added.
So what can you as a business do to help the situation and protect our precious water supplies around the world? The central message from this year’s World Water Day is that nature-based solutions like planting trees to replenish forests, restoring wetlands and reconnecting rivers to floodplains is a cost-effective and sustainable way of rebalancing the water cycle, improving human health and livelihoods, and mitigating the effects of climate change.
Raising awareness is certainly something you as a company could do to help and there are lots of branded resources on the World Water Day website that you could use to help encourage people to be more mindful about their use of water. There are web banners you can put on your site, bags, cups and T-shirts, office stationery, calendars and information cards so you’re sure to find something you could use.
It might also be a good idea to consider training up a few members of your team on water solutions – and the United Nations Institute for Training and Research, and Scotland’s Centre of Expertise for Waters at the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow) have just developed an eLearning course: Local Water Solutions for Global Challenges.
The aim is to build capacity on sustainable water resource management and treatment, a good understanding of water governance and to introduce key techniques to build water resilience – which could certainly prove useful and highly informative for you as a company.
Want to talk to water management consultants? Get in touch with the H2O Building Services team today.