World Water Day - coming up this week (17/03/08)

Greetings everyone:

In November 2007 the UN officially launched 2008 as the International Year of Sanitation, hoping to use the opportunity to accelerate progress towards reducing the number of people worldwide who are without proper sanitation facilities. Although statistics show that more than 1.2 billion people worldwide have gained access to improved sanitation between 1990 and 2004, this still leaves an estimated 2.6 billion people without such access – and 980 million of them are children. This lack of adequate sanitation has a direct impact on human health. As we noted in our World Wetlands Day materials, it also has an impact on wetland health when untreated human sewage ends up in wetlands, resulting in further impacts on human health.

Coming up this week is the globally celebrated World Water Day – on Thursday, March 20th – which will be focused on sanitation and human health issues. Start here http://www.unwater.org/worldwaterday/flashindex.html to find the sanitation facts that have been made available by UN Water and then move on to the International Year of Sanitation web site here http://esa.un.org/iys/.

If you have time, it is worth visiting other web sites for the resources they have made available on sanitation issues. Two examples below.

WASH: Water supply and sanitation collaborative council, set up under a mandate from the United Nations, has an informative web site here http://www.wsscc.org/ with useful resource materials.

Water Aid, a UK-based international charity, has an excellent web site that showcases their programme of work and some excellent communication materials and resources for teachers: http://www.wateraid.org/uk/.

Best wishes, Sandra Hails, Ramsar Secretariat

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