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	Access to water still a dream to millions of people by Thalif Deen Inter Press Service Sweden - Stockholmn   Sept 14, 2010   A weeklong international conference here has transmitted a strong political message to next week''s U.N. summit meeting of world leaders: what good is the fight against poverty, hunger, maternal mortality and child deaths if water and sanitation are not given the high priority they deserve?   According to U.N. estimates, over 2.6 billion people have no access to basic sanitation while over 900 million people have no access to safe drinking water. Continuing to neglect water and sanitation, the statement affirmed, "is a recipe for disaster, and the failure of all MDGs."   When Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told the European Forum last week that the number of hungry people worldwide has risen above a billion "for the first time ever", he also unwittingly turned the spotlight on water.   By current estimates, nearly 70 percent of water use worldwide is for agriculture, irrigation and food crops.   So, why is water given the cold shoulder on the agenda of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), particularly at a time when hunger is escalating?   A statement unanimously approved by over 2,500 water experts at the conclusion of the Stockholm international water conference pointedly says: "We urge the participants of the high-level plenary meeting on the MDGs to recognize fully, and act upon, the fundamental roles of water resources, drinking water, sanitation and hygiene for achieving the MDGs."   The experts also said the management of water resources, water services and sanitation are some of the most cost efficient ways to address the MDGs.   According to U.N. estimates, over 2.6 billion people have no access to basic sanitation while over 800 to 900 million people have no access to safe drinking water.   Continuing to neglect water and sanitation, the statement affirmed, "is a recipe for disaster, and the failure of all MDGs."   Anders Berntell, executive director of the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI), which hosted the conference, said that water has definitely not received the priority it deserves in the outcome document or plan of action that will be adopted at the summit next week.   "Good management of water resources and the provision of drinking water and sanitation is a prerequisite for fulfilling all the MDGs," including poverty, hunger, maternal health and child mortality (which is related mostly to water-related deaths), he added.   Maude Barlow of the Canada-based Blue Planet Project told IPS water is at the heart of everything: "No clean water, no food; no clean water, no health; no clean water, no schools; no clean water, no equality of rights; no clean water, no peace."   Water and sanitation should be far higher on the priority list as an essential goal without which none of the others can be achieved, she added.   The path to a water secure world is a huge part of the answer to conflict, climate crisis, poverty and injustice, said Barlow, who also served as a senior advisor on water to the president of the U.N. General Assembly two years ago.   She challenged the statement in the outcome document that there has been positive movement on the goals on water and sanitation.   "While I acknowledge, of course, the hard work of many non- governmental organisations (NGOs) and some governments to dealing with this crisis, the simple fact is that the U.N.''s own agencies and others are telling a different story - one in which the crisis is deepening all over the world," she said.   Barlow pointed out that a recent World Bank report found that by 2030, demand for water will outstrip supply by 40 percent.   And the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) says that right now, one in three Africans do not have adequate access to water and sanitation, but that at current rate of demand, and in the next one to two decades, one in two Africans will not have access at all.   "This is a direct contradiction to the statistics we are seeing from the MDG report," she said, adding, "Finally, I have long been concerned that the MDG goals do not take into account ecosystem protection and restoration."   Success of the goals is defined by the number of pipes built and the number of people who technically have more access, in spite of the fact that often this water is either not safe or not affordable because it is beyond the price range of much of the population.   At the same time, said Barlow, very little attention is paid to the fact that humans are pumping groundwater far faster than it can be replenished and extracting and polluting our rivers and lakes to death.   There is not enough groundwater for all even if the MDG goals were to succeed brilliantly, without a major new commitment to protecting source water and rebuilding ecosystems. This, of course, would totally challenge the doctrine of unlimited growth and unregulated global trade all governments are so keen on and that is the heart of the problem, she said.   "The MDGs on water? Too little, not focused properly, not put in the larger context that would lead us to a more just and sustainable world and a solution to all of the other MDG goals as well," Barlow declared.   Meanwhile, at the Stockholm water conference last week, Charity Ngilu, Kenya''s minister for water and irrigation, told delegates: "We are in a situation where there is not enough water for all uses, whether for power production, agricultural, industrial or domestic use."   She said access to water is a dream to millions of people in Africa''s arid and semi-arid lands who have to cover long distances to get it. In many instances, the source is already compromised in terms of quality.   They get water from polluted sand and surface dams, and untreated and contaminated point sources. The situation is aggravated by catchment degradation due to poverty, she pointed out.   Globally, she said, fresh water resources are rapidly diminishing. In modern times, water pollution is on the increase and gross quality deterioration is evident in many water bodies.   "Water stress has led most often to conflicts at local and regional levels. More conflicts and tensions are likely to arise within national borders, in the downstream areas of distressed river basins," she warned.
	Acting on Food Security by Conservation International USA   The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) defines food security as a "situation that exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life."   Conservation International works at both the field and policy level to demonstrate that ecosystem health is essential to long-term food security and to promote sustainable livelihoods where agricultural production and resource conservation positively reinforce each other.   Presently, a very large percentage of the world''s population is food-insecure. Although overall global food production is sufficient to meet the needs of the world’s people, over 1 billion do not consume daily minimal requirements for protein and calories (UNEP 2009), and 2 billion people lack sufficient micronutrient intake undermining their health status.   Presently, global food security is mainly limited by access to food – a problem almost always linked to poverty. Therefore the challenge of food security is integrally linked to livelihoods. Ensuring that people have a sustainable financial means to obtain the food they need addresses one of the key factors of food security.   As such, after decades of neglect, agriculture, as a means to address both food security and livelihoods, is once again seen as a potential driver of rural development, especially in Africa.   Global food demand is predicted to double by 2050 as a consequence of a projected population increase of 2.7 billion more people, increased incomes and changing consumption patterns.   This expanding demand is threatened by increasing areas of agricultural land being used for non-food crops such as biofuels, the degradation of agricultural land, the effects of climate change on agriculture and the production decline in global fisheries and wild-harvested land species.   Present poverty and future food demand call for massive investments in sustainably managed agriculture and fisheries, and donors are stepping up to the challenge.   But the environmental impacts of these investments are poorly understood, and without a direct link to nature’s services, these investments stand to have highly destructive environmental impacts. Integrating ecosystem services into the development agenda is an essential part of viably addressing the challenge of food security.   July 2010   Knowledge needed tackle the global hunger crisis.   To feed the world, understanding how natural ecosystems support agricultural landscapes is vital, a new report published in Nature argues. The Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring (TEAM) Network is the key to this.   The global hunger crisis will be exacerbated by ignorance, a new report in Nature, co-authored by Conservation International''s Dr. Sandy Andelman, argues today. The report claims that to tackle it we need a unified global approach that includes studying the ecosystems that support us – a service that the Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring (TEAM) Network is already providing.   The report, entitled "Monitoring the World''s Agriculture," was co-authored by celebrated economist Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, Dr. Andelman, and another 22 of the world''s leading thinkers on food security. It focuses on the need for holistic monitoring of landscapes in a manner that considers – at multiple scales – how they can be sustainably managed for long-term benefit rather than exploited to achieve short-term "successes" within narrow parameters that may do more harm than good.   It says: "Historically, agricultural strategies have been assessed on the basis of a narrow range of criteria, such as profitability or yields. In the future, the monitoring of agricultural systems should address environmental sustainability, food security (people''s access to food and the quality of that food), and human health and economic and social well-being."   Dr. Andelman, Vice President for the TEAM Network at Conservation International, explains: "We need quantitative data on the production and value of key services people get from ecosystems, like providing the water for crops, fuel wood, the quality of soil and on pollinators. We also need to understand how the global climate is changing and the implications of these changes for agricultural and natural systems. These integrated data are critical to prevent informational tunnel vision, and its associated consequences which could include ecosystem and societal collapse."   The TEAM Network, which is a partnership of Conservation International (CI), the Smithsonian Institution, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and Missouri Botanical Garden, is already providing multi-scale, standardized data from 16 tropical sites in Africa, Asia and Latin America that enables scientists to understand entire systems – from changes in the way single trees are growing, to macro-scale impacts across the whole landscape, to regional and global responses to climate change.   TEAM is providing this information on the web in near real time, for free, to the global scientific community. TEAM is a network by design, and the sites systematically span the range of key environmental gradients, for example, from high rainfall to low rainfall, and anthropogenic gradients, from landscapes largely converted to human uses to those with little or no human use. The network began with a focus on tropical forest systems, but now expanded – initially in southern Tanzania – to regional scales and has put in place a monitoring framework to detect the impact of agricultural intensification on ecosystem services.   But while the critical first step – the recognition of the need for TEAM and other systems that provide this multi-scale information about entire systems – has been taken, the global community now needs to invest in ensuring that they cover the world''s most important ecosystems and agricultural production systems. TEAM is already working with other monitoring systems and within the next 2 years will be operating in 40 landscapes worldwide – but even this is just the beginning.   Dr. Andelman added: "We need to rapidly increase the scale of the TEAM Network and other monitoring systems and ensure the metrics they use are standardized. As today''s Nature article points out, we need this global information network now to find robust solutions to the challenges of food security, climate security and biodiversity security as the world population heads toward the 7 billion mark by 2012 and almost 10 billion by 2050." Visit the related web page
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