Quality Unknown: The invisible water crisis by
Water quantity--too much in the case of floods, or too little in the case of droughts--grabs public attention and the media spotlight. Water quality--being predominantly invisible and hard to detect--goes largely unnoticed. Quality Unknown: The Invisible Water Crisis presents new evidence and new data that call urgent attention to the hidden dangers lying beneath water's surface. It shows how poor water quality stalls economic progress, stymies human potential, and reduces food production.Quality Unknown examines the effects of water quality on economic growth and finds upstream pollution lowers growth in downstream regions. It reveals that some of the most ubiquitous contaminants in water, such as nitrates and salt, have impacts that are larger, deeper, and wider than has been acknowledged. And it traces the damage to crop yields and the stark implications for food security in affected regions.An important step toward tackling the world's water quality challenge is recognizing its scale. The world needs reliable, accurate, and comprehensive information so that policy makers can have new insights, decision making can be evidence based, and citizens can call for action. The report calls for a paradigm shift that emphasizes safer, and often more cost-effective remedies that prevent pollution by combining smarter policies with newer technologies. A key message of Quality Unknown is that such solutions exist and change is possible.
SDG6 - Clean Water and Sanitation: Balancing the water cycle for sustainable life on earth by
Providing safe and clean water for all without damaging the environment is one of the biggest challenges of the SDGs. SDG6 is an ambitious goal which seeks to establish the framework through which environmentally responsible water resource management, sanitation and security can be achieved. Bridging academic discussion and real-world case studies, this book considers the challenge of balancing the provision of the basic human right of access to water whilst not eroding our capacity to live sustainably in a rapidly changing world. It considers the impact of climate change on the water cycle and discusses how this will increase the vulnerability of communities, including those in regions that already experience acute water challenges. The book also highlights the need for more urgent action on increasing the resilience and quality of freshwater ecosystems and how this links to sanitation practices. The book concludes with a discussion of some of the key challenges and possible solutions to meeting SDG6. Concise Guides to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goalscomprises 17 short books, each examining one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The series provides an integrated assessment of the SDGs from economic, legal, social, environmental and cultural perspectives.
Manual on the Human Rights to Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation for Practitioners by
The Manual highlights the human rights principles and criteria in relation to drinking water and sanitation. It explains the international legal obligations in terms of operational policies and practice that will support the progressive realisation of universal access. The Manual introduces a human rights perspective that will add value to informed decision making in the daily routine of operators, managers and regulators. It also encourages its readership to engage actively in national dialogues where the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation are translated into national and local policies, laws and regulations. Creating such an enabling environment is, in fact, only the first step in the process towards progressive realisation. Allocation of roles and responsibilities is the next step, in an updated institutional and operational set up that helps apply a human rights lens to the process of reviewing and revising the essential functions of operators, service providers and regulators.
Water and Sanitation-Related Diseases and the Changing Environment by
The revised and updated second edition of Water and Sanitation Related Diseases and the Changing Environment offers an interdisciplinary guide to the conditions responsible for water and sanitation related diseases. The authors discuss the pathogens, vectors, and their biology, morbidity and mortality that result from a lack of safe water and sanitation. The text also explores the distribution of these diseases and the conditions that must be met to reduce or eradicate them. The text includes contributions from authorities from the fields of climate change, epidemiology, environmental health, environmental engineering, global health, medicine, medical anthropology, nutrition, population, and public health. Covers the causes of individual diseases with basic information about the diseases and data on the distribution, prevalence, and incidence as well as interconnected factors such as environmental factors. The authors cover access to and maintenance of clean water, and guidelines for the safe use of wastewater, excreta, and grey water, plus examples of solutions. Written for students, and professionals in infectious disease, public health and medicine, chemical and environmental engineering, and international affairs, the second edition of Water and Sanitation Related Diseases and the Changing Environment isa comprehensive resource to the conditions responsible for water and sanitation related diseases.
Sanitation, Drinking-Water and Health - Achievements and Challenges Ahead by
This report deals primarily with the analysis of the drinking-water and sanitation situation in the member countries of the Thematic Working Group on Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (TWG WSH), based on statistics published by the World Health Organization (WHO) and United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation (JMP) updated in 2015. This document also provides key information on selected health and development issues for TWG WSH member countries. The member countries covered in this report are: Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Japan, the Lao People's Democratic Republic, Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar, the Philippines, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, Thailand and Viet Nam. Previous documents prepared by WHO for the TWG WSH include extensive analyses of the drinking-water, sanitation and hygiene sector as a whole, based on country-level information. A key finding of this report is that the TWG WSH region has succeeded in meeting the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target for drinking-water and sanitation, which is to "halve, by 2015, the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking-water and basic sanitation" (UN, 2017). Individually, nine TWG WSH countries achieved the MDG sanitation target, but four countries (i.e. Cambodia, Indonesia, Mongolia and the Philippines) did not. All TWG WSH countries met the MDG drinking-water target except Mongolia, which fell short of the target by 13 percentage points. Overall, 77% of people in the TWG WSH region are using improved sanitation facilities, whereas 94% are using improved drinking-water sources (UNICEF and WHO, 2015). Despite an impressive effort made to provide drinking-water and sanitation infrastructure to the residents in this region, about one quarter of the population still lacks access to improved sanitation and 7% lacks access to improved drinking-water. Water-related diseases, including diarrhoeal diseases, are significant causes of death among children under 5 years old in the region. Almost 30 000 people in the TWG WSH region, especially children under 5, die each year due to water, sanitation and hygiene related diseases (WHO, 2014).
The Poisoned City: Flint's water and the American urban tragedy by
Winner of The Hillman Prize for Book Journalism - 2019 When the people of Flint, Michigan, turned on their faucets in April 2014, the water pouring out was poisoned with lead and other toxins. Through a series of disastrous decisions, the state government had switched the city's water supply to a source that corroded Flint's aging lead pipes. Complaints about the foul-smelling water were dismissed: the residents of Flint, mostly poor and African American, were not seen as credible, even in matters of their own lives. It took eighteen months of activism by city residents and a band of dogged outsiders to force the state to admit that the water was poisonous. By that time, twelve people had died and Flint's children had suffered irreparable harm. The long battle for accountability and a humane response to this man-made disaster has only just begun. In the first full account of this American tragedy, Anna Clark's The Poisoned City recounts the gripping story of Flint's poisoned water through the people who caused it, suffered from it, and exposed it. It is a chronicle of one town, but could also be about any American city, all made precarious by the neglect of infrastructure and the erosion of democratic decision making. Places like Flint are set up to fail--and for the people who live and work in them, the consequences can be fatal.
Ebb and Flow by
Migration shapes the lives of those who move and transforms the geographies and economies of their points of departure and destinations alike. The water sector, and the availability of water itself, implicitly and explicitly shape migration flows. Ebb and Flow: Volume 1. Water, Migration, and Development presents new global evidence to advance our understanding of how fluctuations in water availability, as induced by rainfall shocks, influence internal migration, and hence regional development. It finds that cumulative water deficits result in five times as much migration as water excess does. But there are important nuances in why and when these events lead to migration. Where there is extreme poverty and migration is costly, water deficits are more likely to trap people than induce them to migrate. Water shocks can also influence who migrates. Workers leaving regions because of water deficits are often less advantaged than typical migrants and bring with them lower skills, raising important implications for the migrants themselves and receiving regions. Cities are the destination of most internal migrants, but even here, water scarcity can haunt them. Water shortages in urban areas, which lead to so-called day zero events, can significantly slow urban growth and compound the vulnerability of migrants. No single policy can be completely effective at protecting people and their assets from water shocks. Instead, the report puts forth a menu of overlapping and complementary policy options that target both people and places to improve livelihoods and turn water-induced crises into opportunities for growth. A key message is that policies that focus on reducing the impacts of water shocks must be complemented by strategies that broaden opportunities and build the longterm resilience of communities. Doing so will give individuals more agency to determine the best outcome for themselves and to thrive wherever they may choose to locate.
Some subject terms to try in our databases and OneSearch to get you started:
Try combining one of the terms above with a related concept such as a disease caused by poor drinking water (for example, dysentery). Link the terms using the search connector AND (for example, water AND children AND dysentery). To learn more about combining terms to build more complex searches, go to the Research Basics tab on this guide.
Search Library resources In our OneSearch: