Clean water, sanitation, and hygiene is the most important human resource to health and survival. I feel as it is not spoken about enough that billions of people lack these resources every day. As the population is rapidly increasing, the demand for clean water rises. Around 2 billion people lack access to safely managed drinking water at home, and 8 out 10 people who continue to lack basic drinking water services live in rural areas. As for sanitation, around 3.6 billion people, which is nearly half the world’s population, do not have access to safely managed sanitation in their homes.
Why is there such a demand for clean water? Well due to the rise in population it has also created more trash and pollution to our bodies of water. Rivers, lakes, and aquifers are drying up or becoming too contaminated to use. More than half of the world’s wetlands have wiped out. Agriculture uses the most water of any source and wastes a large portion of it due to inefficiency. Climate change also plays a role with the changing weather and water patterns all throughout the planet, generating shortages and droughts in some regions and floods in others.
What can we do to help prevent these issues? We can help keep the water clean and sanitary by reducing pollution, protecting and restore water-related ecosystems, and we can expand international cooperation to developing countries in water and sanitation activities and programs. We can help reduce pollution and other hazards such as eliminating dumping and minimizing release of hazardous chemicals and materials. We can help by protecting our mountains, forests, wetlands, rivers, and lakes from picking up trash and and not killing animals or plants. By expanding we can participate in water harvesting, desalination, water efficiency, wastewater treatment, recycling and reuse technologies. Other ways we can help can be finding or starting a charity that you want to support. Any amount, donation, no matter how tiny, may have an impact. Launch a hygienic campaign. Use social media, school/university campaigns, or even neighborhood campaigns to bring attention to the cleanliness problems in your town. Plan an ocean and river cleanup initiative. Spread the word to everyone near you to get involved in cleaning up a nearby river, beach, or ocean.
Works cited:
https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/water-and-sanitation/
