Happy World Water Day

by Catherine Laine
March 22nd, 2007

Here is some good/useful/fun water content to celebrate this day.

How we are wasting (or ruining) it

Report: Dams Imperil Rivers from Wired

The Yangtze River gets more than half of China’s industrial waste and sewage. Europe’s Danube has lost most of its surrounding wetlands. And the Rio Grande has become so shallow that salt water is seeping in, bringing ocean fish that threaten freshwater species.

More videos from the Sietch Blog

How we can save it

Sea of People’s Call to Action from Treehugger

Mark April 14th on your calendar, clear your schedule for the day, and head down to Battery Park in New York City for what could very well be the largest environmental-activist event since Earth Day 1970. Thousands of participants, all dressed in blue, are expected to show up for Sea of People, a mass rally and “interactive artistic installation” that will stretch north from the Battery, in two columns, along the projected eastern and western 10-foot waterlines of a future lower Manhattan—one that might find much of itself underwater.
Put plastic bottle filled with sand in your toilet tank via Hugg
Conserving a cuppa from Gristmill

How we can savor it (clean it or improve it)

Project Bottled Water from the Environmental Working Group via WorldChanging

The Environmental Working Group is building a database of labels from bottled water in order to assess the safety of various brands. It’s an interactive online research project that asks participants to answer a short series of questions about their bottle. They hope the results will aid consumers in knowing what they’re paying for.
New York’s Water Tastes Good via Hugg

The city has the largest drinking-water system in the country, an engineering feat on a par with the Panama Canal, delivering 1.2 billion gallons of water a day through 300 miles of tunnels and aqueducts and 6,000 miles of distribution mains. Moreover, as city officials, water connoisseurs and native boosters have long declared, New York tap water is among the world’s purest and tastiest. It is praised in foreign-language guidebooks, and some city bakers credit its mineral content and taste for their culinary success.

That horrible stale taste you get sometimes get in NY water is from old pipes.
Clear about water from PSD Blog

This week two experts will bring you some of the latest thinking here at the World Bank and IFC on water issues. What role should the World Bank play in privatization of water utilities? Should IFC pay for high-risk, micro-scale technologies? Is all water worth cleaning?
World Water Day from THD Blog

[T]he magazine Strategy+Business has feature article on global infrastructure and the costs need to update our water, power and transportation systems. Upgrading water systems will require the bulk of the costs (see graphic below). From the article: “The world’s urban infrastructure needs a $40 trillion makeover. Here’s how to reinvigorate our electricity, water, and transportation systems by integrating finance, governance, technology, and design.”
Segway creator unveils his next act from CNN
Inventor Dean Kamen wants to put entrepreneurs to work bringing water and electricity to the world’s poor.

Hmm.
Text Messaging for Safe Water from WorldChanging

Lex van Geen and his colleagues at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University are working to reduce the exposure to arsenic through their development of an SMS - accessible database to best inform communities of how deep to drill their wells to avoid arsenic. A pilot project incorporated data from 300,000 wells into the Welltracker database, which reports for each village the number of wells tested, the proportion of unsafe wells and, when available, the start depth together with an estimate of the probability that the estimate is correct.
All-Purpose Water Filters For Humanitarian Projects from Treehugger
A v. good overview of the arsenic problem: A race to fix a 30-year-old ’solution’ in the Christian Science Monitor

Global Warming Scary

Getting ready for hurricane season from PSD Blog

Caribbean States are highly vulnerable to natural disasters–on average, one major hurricane affects a country in the region every 2 years–and have only limited options available to respond. Most recently, losses resulting from Hurricane Ivan in Grenada amounted to 200% of Grenada’s gross domestic product (GDP) and were significant in Jamaica and the Cayman Islands
Defining Desertification from NASA Earth Observatory via Sociolingo