The Middle East and North Africa region loses about $21 billion each year because of an inadequate supply of water and sanitation, the World Bank said Tuesday, warning that urgent action is needed to prevent ripple effects on stability and growth.
"As the current conflict and migration crisis unfolding in the Middle East and North Africa shows, failure to address water challenges can have severe impacts on people’s well-being and political stability," the report said.
Overall, 183 million people lack access to basic drinking water in countries affected by conflict, violence and instability around the world, it added.
Better management With the urban population in the Middle East and North Africa expected to double by 2050 to nearly 400 million, a combination of policy, technology and water management tools should be used to improve the water situation, the World Bank report said.
"Water productivity — in other words, how much return you get for every drop of water used — in the Middle East in general is the lowest on average in the world," said Anders Jägerskog, a specialist in water resources management at the World Bank and one of the report’s authors.
To reverse the trend, technology and innovation are "essential but not enough," Jägerskog told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Water governance — in particular, water tariffs and subsidies — must also be addressed, he said.
The region has the world’s lowest water tariffs and spends the highest proportion of GDP on public water subsidies.
Such policies lead to excessive use of already scarce water supplies and are not sustainable, said Jägerskog.
Untreated wastewater Another challenge is that more than half of the wastewater collected in the region is fed back into the environment untreated.

Tonko Promotes $8 Billion Drinking Water Bill At Albany Med.
The city of Albany alone has 317 miles of water pipes, some of which are 135 years old.
Nationwide, Tonko says leaking pipes lose an estimated 7 billion gallons of clean drinking water every day, there are more than 700 water main breaks every day, and there may be as many as 10 million lead-contaminated service lines in use.
Tonko is promoting the Drinking Water System Improvement Act of 2017.
Albany Mayor Kathy Sheehan says clean water is an important component of economic growth and development.
Albany Med used almost 77 million gallons of water at its main site in 2016.
"I wanna thank Albany Medical Center for being a large user of our water and we take your faith in us very seriously, and we are making investments every day to ensure that our drinking water is safe and that we are able to supply water at the right pressures to our customers."
Drinking Water By the Numbers: · Albany, NY alone has 317 miles of pipes, some of them as much as 135 years old · 86% of U.S. households rely on public water supplies.
· Leaking pipes lose an estimated 7 billion gallons of clean drinking water every day.
· There are more than 700 water main breaks every day.

Iran: Plight Of Political Prisoners Signals Regime Turmoil.
International spotlight is again on Tehran’s nuclear program, with the United States demanding United Nations inspectors be granted access to its military sites.
Equally troubling is Iran’s collaboration with North Korea to pursue their nuclear ambitions and ballistic missile capabilities.
Such dossiers are enough to undermine the spirit of the JCPOA, Tehran now also considers its meddling in the Middle East indispensable in its effort to establish a regional empire reaching the Mediterranean.
As a result, receiving far less attention than it deserves is Iran’s Achilles Heel: human rights violations.
In the past month another urgent plight has emerged as dozens of political prisoners in Raja’i Shahr (Gohardasht) prison of Karaj, west of Tehran were suddenly transferred into a section on July 30th and kept under “suffocating” conditions, as described by Amnesty International.
On this day over 50 political prisoners in ward 10 of Raja’i Shahr prison witnessed authorities resort to force in transferring them to the new location.
A number of these cases are in need of dire medical care in outside facilities.
Iranian authorities have human rights commitments they are obligated to live up to.
Other such prisoners in different facilities across the country are launching their own similar hunger strikes in solidarity with the Raja’i Shahr political prisoners.

It meant our fundamental human right to clean, safe, affordable and accessible water would be preserved.
It meant we no longer had to ponder the horrendous consequences of what life would be like if we turned on the faucet and clean, safe water would not flow.
They suffer from a water crisis no amount of rainfall can solve.
There are about 300 unsafe drinking water systems across the state and together they present a public health problem greater in scope than the well-chronicled water crisis in Flint, Michigan.
By and large, they serve low-income families for whom having to buy water — in addition to paying their water bill — presents a monstrous economic challenge.
Senate Bill 623, introduced by one of the authors of this article, would create a Safe and Affordable Drinking Water Fund designed to provide emergency relief and a sustainable long-term solution by funding water treatment facilities that these small water systems cannot possible afford on their own.
Funding would come from two sources.
Because in many cases the source of contamination is a high concentration of nitrates, an unavoidable byproduct of farming operations, the agricultural community is stepping up to support a fee to cover nitrate-related costs.
It is a problem we are morally compelled to solve, and a sensible solution is at hand.
Tim Johnson is president and CEO of the California Rice Commission.

Over 180 million people lack drinking water in Nigeria, other countries facing conflicts – UNICEF.
Related News Over 180 million people living in countries affected by conflicts, violence and instability do not have access to basic drinking water, a new report by the United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF, has revealed.
These include over 3.6 million people in the north-east of Nigeria where the Boko Haram insurgency has damaged about 75 per cent of water and sanitation infrastructure, the report noted.
The report, which was released Tuesday, is in commemoration of this year’s World Water Week holding August 27 to September 1.
The theme of the 2017 World Water Week is “Water and Waste – Reduce and Reuse”.
Around 15 million people in the country have been cut off from regular access to water and sanitation.
“In South Sudan, where fighting has raged for over three years, almost half the water points across the country have been damaged or completely destroyed”, the report states.
“In Yemen, for example, children make up more than 53 per cent of the over half a million cases of suspected cholera and acute watery diarrhoea reported so far.
And in South Sudan, the cholera outbreak is the most severe the country has ever experienced, with more than 19,000 cases since June 2016.
“In famine-threatened north-east Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen, nearly 30 million people, including 14.6 million children, are in urgent need of safe water.

Ryan Thorpe and Rachel Chang from the USA win 2017 Stockholm Junior Water Prize.
Stockholm Junior Water Prize on Tuesday for their novel approach to detect and purify water contaminated with Shigella, E. coli, Salmonella, and Cholera.
As the pair received the prize, Rachel Chang said: "I’m feeling so overwhelmed with emotions.
In its citation, the Jury said: "This year’s winning project embodies the fundamental principle of providing safe drinking water.
The project developed a unique, rapid, and sensitive method to identify, quantify and control water contaminants."
The students constructed a system that detects and purifies water contaminated with Shigella, E. coli, Salmonella, and Cholera more rapidly and sensitively than conventional methods.
The students’ novel approach could prevent the contraction and outbreak of waterborne diseases and expand potable water throughout the world.
The project has the potential to revolutionize the future of water quality," the Jury said.
Teams from 33 countries competed in the 2017 finals.
Information about Stockholm International Water Institute; Stockholm Junior Water Prize and World Water Week: http://www.siwi.org and http://www.worldwaterweek.org SOURCE Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) For further information: Press contact: Kanika Thakar, SIWI, +46-8-1213-6036

Tonko Promotes $8 Billion Drinking Water Bill At Albany Med.
The city of Albany alone has 317 miles of water pipes, some of which are 135 years old.
Nationwide, Tonko says leaking pipes lose an estimated 7 billion gallons of clean drinking water every day, there are more than 700 water main breaks every day, and there may be as many as 10 million lead-contaminated service lines in use.
Tonko is promoting the Drinking Water System Improvement Act of 2017.
Albany Mayor Kathy Sheehan says clean water is an important component of economic growth and development.
Albany Med used almost 77 million gallons of water at its main site in 2016.
"I wanna thank Albany Medical Center for being a large user of our water and we take your faith in us very seriously, and we are making investments every day to ensure that our drinking water is safe and that we are able to supply water at the right pressures to our customers."
Drinking Water By the Numbers: · Albany, NY alone has 317 miles of pipes, some of them as much as 135 years old · 86% of U.S. households rely on public water supplies.
· Leaking pipes lose an estimated 7 billion gallons of clean drinking water every day.
· There are more than 700 water main breaks every day.

Water investments are lumpy and costly: financing is essential to spread the costs of these investments out over time.
It can no longer be the only one, however.
To meet the Sustainable Development Goals, governments will need to better target their investments and leverage more financing from private sources, including from households that can afford it (via more realistic and fair tariff policies and incentives to invest in things like toilets) and from commercial finance providers, including microfinance institutions, commercial banks, bond investors or venture capitalists.
A this year’s Stockholm World Water Week, the World Bank is releasing a report which provides guidance to governments and private financiers on “Easing the Transition to Commercial Finance for Sustainable Water and Sanitation”.
Taken together, these messages set out a strong case for sector reforms that will help service providers transition to a more mature modus operandi, in which they strive to minimize their costs, receive tariffs that cover a predictable portion of their (more efficient) costs, and borrow a greater portion of their investment requirements from domestic financiers.
First, commercial finance does not necessarily cost more than concessional finance, once all “hidden” costs are taken into account.
Concessional finance usually comes in hard currency; by contrast, domestic commercial finance is in local currency.
Other hidden costs include delays in arranging financing, which are typically higher for concessional financing than for commercial financing: during that period, the local currency may devalue further, and more importantly, the social and economic benefits associated with the investment do not materialize.
In Tunisia, for example, a detailed analysis of financial flows to the WASH sector conducted using the WHO/GLAAS TrackFin methodology found that national public transfers to government-owned utilities had increased by 70 percent between 2013 and 2015, reaching US$ 93 million per year in 2015, whereas transfers to community-based organizations operating in rural areas were a mere US$ 12 million and no public funds were provided to households to help them invest in on-site sanitation.
In the the water sector, governments should: Define and consistently implement sector financing policies Support overall sector reform for corporatization, stronger governance and transparency Focus on improving service providers’ efficiency and performance to set them on a course towards credit-worthiness Improve the use of public funds and target subsidies where commercial financing would be more challenging.

World Water Week: 10 shocking facts about the global water crisis.
As research released for World Water Week (27 August – 1 September) warns that more than 100 cities face flood-related risks similar to those currently being felt in Houston, edie dives deep into the data to pull out 10 alarming statistics which underline why businesses must act NOW.
The impacts are currently being felt in the Texan city of Houston, where at least nine people have reportedly died and more than 30,000 have been forced to evacuate their homes in response to severe flooding caused by Hurricane Harvey.
This has seen the number of people trapped in vehicles increased as a result, and the 103 cities at risk from flooding would do well to learn from the mistakes of Houston.
Globally, 80% of wastewater flows back into natural pools of water and the ecosystem untreated, without being reused.
4) Businesses have lost $14bn in water damages The CDP analysis shows that disclosing companies have lost $14bn because of impacts related to water, with many suffering from production losses as a result of flooding or from a reliance on electricity sourced from hydropower.
In fact, one third of the system is more than 150 years old.
With 49% of the river systems in the country that classified for drinking water, despite not meeting pollution standards, city councils are worried that saltwater intrusion could impact the limited supply of drinking water.
The distance between source and demand has also added to the problems, with water thefts and leakages meaning that around 30% of the city’s water supply is lost before it enters Karachi each year.
Household water use in Jinja is the lowest amongst all cities globally at just 28 litres a day, although water demand is extremely high.

180 Million People Lack Clean Water Due to Conflict: UNICEF.
In countries affected by conflict, violence and instability, more than 180 million people are deprived of access to clean water, the United Nations Children’s Fund has announced as World Water Week begins.
Sanjay Wijesekera, UNICEF’s global chief of water, sanitation and hygiene, stated, “Children’s access to safe water and sanitation, especially in conflicts and emergencies, is a right, not a privilege," adding, "In countries beset by violence, displacement, conflict and instability, children’s most basic means of survival – water – must be a priority.” Wijesekera also emphasized, “In far too many cases, water and sanitation systems have been attacked, damaged or left in disrepair to the point of collapse.
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seek to previous 12… 6 seek to 10%, 20% … 60% pause-sharp-outline pause-sharp-fill pause-rounded-outline pause-rounded-fill 0:00 0:00 A textbook case is Yemen.
The Saudi-led war of aggression – financed by the United States and the United Kingdom – has rendered the country’s water supply virtually unusable in the past two years.
As a result, Yemeni children comprise more than 53 percent of the over half a million cases of suspected cholera and acute watery diarrhea, according to UNICEF.
Well over seven years of civil war in Syria has resulted in approximately 15 million people – 6.4 percent children – lacking safe water.
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