Dr. Water

Summer/Fall 2007

Turn on the television or pick up a newspaper today, and you will be bombarded with news about the growing global crisis of water deprivation in the developing world. While we in the US often feel immune to such crisis here in the U.S., news of penalty-enforced water restrictions and recently, the U.S. Department of Agriculture issued drought declarations to 1,016 countries across numerous states in the Southeast and Eastern seaboard. In Atlanta, GA, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers warned that Lake Lanier, a 38,000-gallon reservoir that supplies water to the Atlanta metropolitan area, has only a three-month supply left.

Here is the issue! Despite the fact that almost 80 percent of the earth’s surface is covered with water, about 1.2 billion people around the world live without access to safe drinking water, and more than 2.6 billion people lack adequate sanitation. The result: two million people die from water-related diseases each year. Translated, this means that every eight seconds, a child dies from a water-borne illness somewhere in the developing world.

These threats to human and environmental health point to a need for dramatic and thoughtful interventions aimed at producing long-term solutions that will be viable and appropriate for the communities where they are implemented. While images in the media photos of women and emaciated children hauling water, instead of participating in community, academic activities or play, have elicited immediate and diverse responses, it behooves the Global community to collectively address these problems by determining a community-owned and driven sustainable model for improving access to quality drinking water worldwide.

In addition to NGOs, churches, governments and other relief-engaged groups, corporations and businesses around the world are beginning to understand and express the necessity of developing a thoughtful water strategy demonstrating not only awareness, but responding to the struggles of the local communities in which they are often operating globally. Organizational efforts therefore must adapt to the decreasing water availability, while ensuring they are responding to the increasing call for water conservation. Proactive corporate action that dramatically overhauls how companies use and invest in water supplies will be crucial for gaining community goodwill, improving reputation and mitigating risks.

Responding to these issues underscores the complexity and interdependence of these issues. Therefore, responses must consider the environment and the people - the human element – to determine best strategies for implementation. Consideration must also be given to the cultural, economic and social barriers that may preclude successful and community ownership; hence, long-term utility and maintenance. Not only are the engineering solutions important, determination of scalability, tariffs and policy implications must be at the forefront of any intervention and solution to best support long-term viability.

When one considers that the health care systems depends on the availability of water as a critical and necessary element, the emerging water crisis globally appears to also present a demanding challenge to addressing primary and chronic disease care globally. However, the interdependence of health care and water provisioning is yet to be considered to ensure that the communities we seek to serve are not forced to choose between water for sanitation and hygiene, or the use of water for household functioning including health care activities. Ultimately, not only must we consider the availability of water and its quality, we must also think about the utility of water and how the appropriate value will be determined and assessed, recognizing that water is essential for stakeholders within the industrial, commercial, agricultural and individual domains. This position is aligned with the assertion of the UNEP flagship report on status of the global environment which calls for holistic measures to be adopted by all stakeholders in the water and environmental sectors to cushion fresh water resources from human and ecological threats.

Responsively, through its mission, the Institute for Public Health and Water Research (IPWR) contributes to the discovery of evidenced-based sustainable solutions that are health promoting, of value to the community and its leadership, and from which key learnings can be extracted to inform best practices. To achieve these goals, IPWR proposes that the following strategic pillars are required: research; culturally relevant education and outreach; synthesis of knowledge; and translation and dissemination to the stakeholder community including government, corporations, NGOs and individuals.

The goals of IPWR are to:

1. Foster the development of compelling and evidenced-based knowledge in water and health.
2. Synthesize, translate and disseminate findings to diverse stakeholders to increase awareness and education of the value of water consumption to human and environmental health worldwide.
3. Discover best practices for interventions used to address delivery, quality, safety, management, storage and utility of water worldwide.
4. Delineate the global health, social, educational and policy implications of children and women’s involvement in water-related issues.
5. Convene stakeholders to promote consideration of the linkages between gender, socio-economic status, economics, geographic, age and cultural factors in the acquisition and utility of water worldwide.

Solutions must therefore be sustainable, community owned, managed and driven to enable and foster economic viability. Such a pathway may lead to improved education, health care services, economic viability and local and political will to foster policy construction, implementation and shared responsibility around governance contributions. Therefore, to design and implement solutions to address the water and public health issues worldwide, we must recognize that without access to the requisite quality and quantity of drinking water, communities worldwide are constrained in achieving the needed platform on which to construct and foster an improved quality of life for its members.

Best regards,

Jennie Ward Robinson, Ph.D.