In the fast growing urban areas of the developing world, clean, efficient infrastructure and management of sanitation and waste facilities will require considerable up-front financial investments.
The economic, social and environmental benefits down the road will far outweigh this initial expenditure.
The World Water Week will take place in Stockholm, August 17 - 23, 2oo8. For a staggering 2,6 billion people, lack of access to adequate sanitation is a major and daily threat to their health and well-being.
This bears tremendous social and environmental costs, of which premature deaths, degradation of living quarters and the environment, and reduced access to education are but the few.
Parallell global trends - population and economic growth, increasing energy demand, changing diets, etc. - increase the amount of water required for development.
While increased agricultural production for food and bioenergy represent interesting new sources of income for rural farmers all over the world, these opportunities must take into account the water-constrained biophysical reality of the planet.
Reducing fossil fuel use will increase demand for bioenergy production. While the second generation of bioethanol may be produced on wastelands or from cellulose, croplands may also be converted for their production.
This increases competition for land and water resources. Climate change mitigation will increase the demand for biomass-based carbon sequestration.
Source: www.worldwaterweek.org
“The way we're really going to grow the economy is to invest in people, to invest in innovation, to have the government put money in the kind of research that will create the new high-technology, BIOTECHNOLGY industries that will create millions of new jobs.” - Joseph Lieberman-
1 comment:
Helge, you are right. Water is the most imortant issue in the world. Energy is another topic which should be discussed globally, but without water we cannot live.
I just read an article about antibitic sensitivity tests of bacteria living in natural waters. Only few of them can be cultivated on traditional agar media, and new methods are definitely needed. The article was dated 1986 but I think that microbial populations of lakes and seas are still quite unknown. Another factor is that mutations of common wastewater flora may modify their activities and they can therefore be regarded as new subspecies which are secrets to us.
I have also read that 1 000 000 cfu in one milliliter water may contain hundreds or thousands of mutant strains. That's Nature!
I am now sure that PMEU - with additions of different stimulating factors - is the best way to study waterborne bacteria. It is, however, very important to understand the role of growth environments when optimizing PMEU incubations: microbes of water are adapted to low nutrient concentrations, and methods of clinical, soil, food and other microbiologies do not favor their growth.
This is a topic which is in my mind always when starting new microbiological tests. We have to apply environmental microbiology into paper industry microbiology because contaminants of paper machines may be originated from soil (minerals), water (raw water, slurry waters), air - and even from geothermic springs (Deinococcus geothermalis)!
Have a nice summer! I just start "agricultural tasks" in the small garden of my summer cottage. Microbes in my composting equipment have already worked for me to produce raw material for potatoes etc!
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