HotSpots H2O, July 6: EU Increases Humanitarian Aid to War-Torn DRC.
The Global Rundown The European Commission will provide an additional €5 million in humanitarian aid to victims of conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where access to food, water, and healthcare is increasingly limited.
The number of new cholera cases in Yemen is slowing, but contaminated water and poor health infrastructure could lead to continued spread of the disease.
Research by Save the Children details the importance of providing psychological support to children displaced from the brutal ISIS-government conflict in Mosul, Iraq.
“You have got more people, with more livestock, on less and less productive rangeland and it’s a really explosive situation.
VOA By The Numbers €28 million Total amount of funding that the EU has provided to the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2017.
The humanitarian aid will help provide the displaced population with water, food, shelter, and healthcare.
Relief Web 219,000 Estimated number of cholera cases in Yemen as of June 26, according to WHO.
South Korea struggles to conserve rainwater and is the world’s fifth-largest importer of “virtual water,” which is water used in industrial and agricultural production.
The situation could be further complicated if North Korea changes the water course on the peninsula by releasing water from its dams.

The old question of which came first, the chicken or the egg, takes on new meaning as scientists advance lab-grown, or cultured, meats.
Earlier this spring, San Francisco-based Memphis Meats announced the successful production of clean poultry developed from animal cells.
Quantum shift in technology Stemming from developments in nanotechnology, food scientists are taking stem cells from live animals and using proprietary cell cultures of oxygen, sugars and minerals to make them grow inside bioreactor tanks.
Memphis Meats reported its cost to produce the first runs of cultured poultry to be in the neighborhood of $9,000 a pound, obviously higher than an average cost of $3 per pound for traditional chicken breasts.
Pioneering this innovation was a Dutch scientist, Mark Post, who in 2013 produced the world’s first lab-grown beef burger, a 5-ounce patty grown from cow stem cells.
In the meantime, other investors are likewise interested in the Earth-bound market, noting that the U.S. consumers spend $90 billion annually on chicken alone.
China’s 1.4 billion citizens consume more than 6 billion pounds of duck annually.
Researchers predict cultured meat could reduce energy usage anywhere from 7 to 45 percent, with 78 to 96 percent reducing in greenhouse gasses.
Brin, in an interview regarding Post’s work in beef, credited the potential environmental impact as being as much a driver as the financial.
The speed of expectation While traditional agriculture producers have a few years to go before products such as these become more commercially available, reason for discussion is as present as the question of regulations.

Global Rainwater Harvesting Industry is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 5.8% during the period, 2017–2025.
According to a recent report published by Progressive Markets, titled, “Global Rainwater Harvesting Market- Size, Trend, Share, Opportunity Analysis, and Forecast, 2014-2025”, the industry is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 5.8% during the period, 2017–2025.
The research describes the global rainwater harvesting market in terms of scope and product.
Request Sample At: www.progressivemarkets.com/industry-research/rainwater-ha… Based on technique, the report classifies the global rainwater harvesting market into surface rooftop rainwater harvesting and run-off harvesting.
The report further classifies the global rainwater harvesting market, such as the North America region, countries explored are Canada, U.S., and Mexico.
It assesses the aforementioned parameters by every technique, end user, and region for the historic period and forecast period.
These strategies include collaboration, product development, acquisition, and product approval.
They also offer an overview of every top vendor.
The aspects that propel progress of the global rainwater harvesting industry include increase in awareness of water scarcity.
These are comprehensive evaluation of aspects that are have potential to restrict or drive the industry.

| Hakim Hayat | A GROUP of local secondary school students hopes to ignite the passion of more young Bruneians in science and technology leadership and innovation through their participation in the inaugural robotics challenge for high school students worldwide organised by First Global in Washington DC, United States next week.
First Global also strives to convince the various national governments and organisations of the world to embrace STEM education, and to support it by investing in their young adults that will soon begin to make their marks in the world.
She hopes that by assembling and mentoring the young Bruneian robotics team to participate in the competition, it will pave way for more awareness on robotics sciences among young Bruneian students and ignite more interest among them, as she feels that its development in the country is often not well known of.
“We want this to be a start to cultivate more awareness on robotics among Bruneian students, to inculcate the mindset earlier among them and from their participation, we want to keep this going by conducting sharing sessions with other schools and we want this to be an annual participation from Brunei,” she said.
These alliances are tasked with accomplishing engineering tasks such as the storing of drinkable water, filtering of contaminated water, and procuring of new sources water.
In a laboratory up stream, the villagers come together to research the contaminants and ultimately create a purification system so contaminants are removed before they reach the villages, thus providing clean water for all.
“It didn’t come without any challenge but it was pretty smooth overall and right now we are just finalising the product and hopefully we will finish it by this week,” she said.
Another team member, Syasya Jamain, 15, from Jerudong International School said the journey benefited all of them because they weren’t all too familiar with the world of robotics at first.
“Through this we learnt the importance of it and how it really benefits a lot of people and how we can help contribute to society,” she said.
They also mentioned that interest about robotics in their school is very limited and people rarely talk about it but hopes that with their participation they hope to widen the understanding and make people know the importance of this technology and how it exists and will continue to grow for the future.

Brian Brooks’s home does not tell the tale of a city knee-deep in a water crisis.
“At one shop you have to buy the tank.
“You can’t get tanks.
“Thou shalt not store grey water: This is the first law and may not be changed‚” warns the website of water specialists‚ Water Rhapsody Conservation Systems.
Restrictions have since been escalated to level 4b‚ which bans all use of potable water outside‚ and Capetonians are being urged to limit individual water use to 87 litres a day.
“Some have taken things to the extreme and have switched to showering only every third day‚” he said.
One Capetonian whose water bills have been zero‚ because her family kept its consumption within the City of Cape Town’s “lifeline” free supply of 200 litres a day‚ is Robyn Christenson‚ 41 from Edgemead.
“We bought two tanks with a volume of 1,000 litres each and use them to collect rain water.
We collect our grey water and use it in the toilet.
From July 1‚ the City of Cape Town is no longer supplying up to 6,000 litres of water a month‚ unless a household is indigent.

(MENAFN – Emirates News Agency (WAM)) DUBAI, 5th July, 2017 (WAM) — A #UAE delegation, headed by Dr. Thani bin Ahmed Al-Zeyoudi, Minister of Climate Change and Environment, is taking part in the FAO Conference 40th Session, attended by Saqr Nasser Al Raisi, #UAE Ambassador to the Republic of #Italy and #UAE Permanent Representative to the Food and #Agriculture Organisation, FAO.
The purpose of the Conference is to convene the Member Nations at FAO headquarters in Rome to review and vote on the Director-General’s proposed programme of work and budget.
Addressing the plenary session of the conference, Dr. Thani Al Zeyoudi said that climate change and its extreme impacts constitute the most important challenge facing agriculture and food production around the world.
He explained that while the world needs to increase agricultural production to meet the rising demand for food due to population growth, we are also required to reduce emissions from the food production sector, which accounts for 21 percent of the total greenhouse gas emissions, in order to achieve the goal of keeping the temperature below two degrees Celsius as compared to the pre-industrial era in accordance with the Paris Agreement.
Dr. Al Zeyoudi added that despite the environmental conditions and constraints, such as limited agricultural land, lack of soil, scarcity of irrigation water and harsh climate, faced by agriculture and food production in the UAE, the country has succeeded in establishing a remarkable agricultural progress based on increasing cultivated large areas of land and supplying water and production rquirements.
The minister explained that the #UAE has adopted flexible and climate-friendly agricultural practices, such as protected, organic and hydroponic agriculture.
The area of hydroponics increased by 124 percent during the period 2013-2016, while organic agriculture increased by more than 368 percent during the same period.
He also highlighted a number of initiatives and projects that the #UAE is working on, such as the Integrated Water and Aquaculture System Initiative, the Sustainable Bioenergy Research Consortium and the Strategic Tunnel Project in Abu Dhabi.
At the end of his speech, the minister extended an invitation to the delegations to participate in the second session of the Climate Change and Food Security Forum, to be held on the sidelines of the World Government Summit in February 2018 in Dubai.
WAM/Nour Salman

Over 2.7 billion people, or 40 percent of the world’s population, don’t have enough of it, and there are dire predictions that looming shortages and dwindling supply will lead to another war at the global scale.
According to estimates by the World Wildlife Fund, given the current consumption rate of fresh water, about two-thirds of the global population could face water shortages by 2025.
You will increase your global carbon footprint when you go to seawater [desalination].” However, technology has come some way since.
And on June 19, researchers from Rice University in Houston, Texas, and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, announced they had created a membrane that uses solar energy and a nanoparticle-membrane to turn salt water into fresh water.
In conventional membrane distillation (top), hot saltwater is flowed across one side of a porous membrane and cold freshwater is flowed across the other.
This off-grid technology is capable of providing sufficient clean water for family use in a compact footprint, and it can be scaled up to provide water for larger communities,” Rice scientist and water treatment expert Qilin Li, a corresponding author on the study, said in a statement.
IDE Americas, a Carlsbad, California, company that manufactures and operates desalination and industrial water treatment plants, is behind the world’s largest desalination plant in Sorek, Israel.
Miriam Faigon, vice president and chief technology officer of assets at the company, explained in a statement to International Business Times how IDE Americas keeps the costs down when operating a plant based on thermal desalination.
When there is waste heat or sufficient electricity available, as is often the case with refineries and power plants, thermal desalination is an efficient and viable solution,” she said.
Lake Baikal in Russia is the single largest surface fresh water body in the world, accounting for 22 percent of the total.

Gheit stresses on mobilising efforts to tackle food security challenges.
Gheit stresses on mobilising efforts to tackle food security challenges Thursday, 06 July, 2017, 08 : 00 AM [IST] Cairo At the 40th Session of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations Conference, currently underway in Rome, Arab League (AL) chief Ahmad Abul Gheit stressed the importance of mobilising international efforts to tackle challenges to water and food security in the Arab region.
“Nearly seven million persons in Yemen, which has been experiencing a fierce civil war, are facing the dangers of famine, which made the country a base for the severest food security crisis in modern history,” he added.
“The armed conflicts in countries of Syria, Libya and Somalia are similar (to Yemen).
They require unifying regional and international efforts to provide the necessary aid for people in harm,” the AL statement quoted Gheit as saying.
It will mainly focus on issues and policies related to global food security.
According to a 2016 report of the Food Security Information Network (FSIN), which was co-sponsored by the United Nations Food Agency, nearly 108 million people were reported to be facing crisis-level food insecurity, a drastic increase from the previous year’s total of almost 80 million.
The FSIN report added that in 2017, widespread food insecurity is likely to persist in Iraq, Syria (including its refugees in neighbouring countries), Malawi and Zimbabwe.
It added that there was a high risk of famine in some areas of north-eastern Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen because of armed conflict, drought and macro-economic collapse.
(Source: Xinhua)

Two water districts have been fighting the tribe in court for four years, and on Wednesday the agencies filed petitions to appeal to the Supreme Court.
The Desert Water Agency and the Coachella Valley Water District are challenging a decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled the tribe has a right to groundwater that was established when the federal government created the reservation in the 1870s.
Managers of the water agencies argue the aquifer is a public resource and the tribe has the same rights under California law as all other landowners to use water pumped from the aquifer.
The water agencies’ managers have questioned Grubbe’s comments, saying the tribe is welcome to participate in managing the aquifer as one of the stakeholders in the community.
“They have just as much a seat as anybody else, if they want it.” Grubbe wasn’t available to comment on the water agencies’ petitions to the Supreme Court this week.
Outside a Ralphs supermarket on reservation land, retiree Bob Valdez said he thinks it’s wasteful for the water districts to be spending so much money fighting the lawsuit.
Lamelle Edington, a Desert Hot Springs resident, agreed that the tribe seems to be in the right.
“It’s their water.
CVWD said in its petition that in the Winters case, the tribes on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in Montana sued “because their water supply was threatened by settlers who had diverted the river upstream of the reservation and claimed rights to the water.” CVWD said the purpose of the Winters doctrine “has always been to protect tribal reservations from depletion of the water they need for survival.” The water district argued that the Agua Caliente tribe’s case is different and that federal reserved rights shouldn’t apply to groundwater at all.
“What the Tribe is seeking… is a federal reserved right to groundwater that the Tribe does not need,” CVWD said in its petition.

Because Turkana is a pastoral region, residents will be seeking a governor who can ensure their perennial pasture and water scarcity is addressed.
Mr Ethuro said Jubilee was campaigning for peace, development, poverty eradication and ensuring residents have food and water.
Top on Mr Munyes’s agenda is to devolve funds further to sub-counties so that residents prioritise their needs.
“Most residents of Turkana are pastoralists and, therefore, that will be a key sector to invest in — to ensure access to water for our livestock and have peace with our neighbours to make pastoralism a worthy venture,” he said.
Mr Nanok will have to ensure ODM wins more seats.
Among his top achievements is improvement of the health sector and early childhood development and opening up the region through investment in road construction.
He dismissed the governor’s claim on bursaries, saying many students had dropped out, forcing leaders to donate to keep them in school.
“Turkana South and Turkana East Sub-Counties, where oil was discovered, will have their share meant for communities around oil sites,” said Mr Munyes, adding that he expected the county government to be allocated 20 per cent of the proceeds of oil.
He pledged to ensure that the Petroleum (Exploration Development and Production) Bill, 2016, which is before the Senate, will guarantee a 20 per cent revenue allocation to the county.
Mr Lomenen, who echoed Mr Munyes, said: “We have told the national government that no oil will be transported from Turkana when the road is not completed and Lokichar connected to the national grid”.