Vampire thinking during mastering – Picture of the day – Kommersant

According to the UN for 2020, 26% of the world’s population, or 2 billion people, were deprived of access to safe drinking water, and 46%, or 3.6 billion people, did not have adequate sanitation. Every year, more than 800,000 people die from diseases caused by poor water quality, poor sanitation and poor hygiene. Such data are provided in the UN report on the state of water resources, in which experts declared “vampiric immoderate consumption and excessive economic development of territories and resources.”

In the last 40 years, the use of water in the world has been growing at an average rate of 1% per year. Due to global population growth and socio-economic development, water consumption will steadily increase at least at the same rate until 2050. But already, almost a third of the world’s population cannot afford to drink clean water, more than 3.5 billion people live in conditions of water scarcity for at least one month a year, about 800 thousand people a year die from the consequences of drinking dirty water or lack of proper sanitation. conditions.

These data are provided in report United Nations, timed to coincide with World Water Day, celebrated annually on March 22. The report will be discussed at the Water Conference opening today at the UN Headquarters in New York.

The conference will be held for the first time since 1977. About 6,500 representatives from 171 countries will take part in it. King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands and President of Tajikistan Emomali Rahmon will preside.

As the report notes, the world is “blindly walking down the dangerous path of vampiric over-consumption and over-exploitation of territories and resources.”

This “inevitably leads” to water scarcity. Already, 10% of the world’s population lives in countries with high or dangerously high levels of water scarcity. The shortage of safe drinking water is particularly acute – and will only get worse – in developing and emerging market economies. The demand for water in such countries is growing along with industrial growth and rapid growth of the urban population, accompanied by large-scale development, excessive consumption, and pollution of water sources.

According to UN estimates, by 2050 the number of city dwellers living in areas with water scarcity will double compared to 2016: from 930 million to 1.7-2.4 billion people.

The most serious situation with water resources in the coming years will remain primarily in the Middle East, in the African Sahel, in northern India.

Significant difficulties will be experienced by the countries of Central Africa, East Asia, and some regions of South America.

The problem of water quality is serious not for individual regions, but for almost the whole world, including developed countries. UN experts note that this is often associated with poor wastewater treatment or agricultural waste. “In the world, 80% of wastewater is discharged into the environment without any treatment at all,” the authors of the report say. “And in many developing countries, this proportion reaches 99%.”

At the same time, as noted in the report, there is enough water on the planet as a whole: in 153 countries of the world there are almost 900 rivers, lakes and aquifers.

Water will be plentiful “if it is managed more efficiently than has been done in the past few decades.”

To improve efficiency, the speakers point to the need to search for “new management models, new financing models, new models of water use and reuse”, as well as attracting new technologies for this.

But most importantly, the UN emphasizes, it is necessary to establish partnership and cooperation between different countries or regions in such areas as controlling pollution of water sources, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, protecting wetlands, protecting and restoring watersheds, creating irrigation systems, creating funds to finance projects in the field of water resources, etc.

Alena Miklashevskaya