When I was a young adult going to school in an urban area in the United States, I often heard about the scourge of the lack of proper education for the kids in our country: an often-quoted figure was the number of children who couldn’t pinpoint Europe on a map, or who thought that milk and eggs came from cartons at the grocery store.
Now that I’m a water professional I’ve been plagued by similar, grown-up versions of this worry: “What if today’s generation of kids thinks that water comes magically out of your tap when you turn a handle and that it just disappears down your toilet?” Hopefully anyone who’s passed a 5th grade science class knows that that’s not the case, but in the international water and sanitation sector we often fall into the trap of thinking in a similarly simplistic way – that providing water and sanitation to all is simply a matter of technology, and pipes, and some other hardware needed to clean our water enough and then once we’ve used it, spirit it away again to some place to begin the process all over again.
This strategy is being implemented through the collaborative efforts of UN Environment’s technical units, regional offices and collaborative centers, such as the Global Wastewater Initiative, which is managed by the GPA (the Global Programme of Action for the Protection of the Marine Environment from Land-based Activities), and the Global Environment Monitoring System, spearheading 30 years of work on water quality monitoring. Colleagues at the UNEP-DHI Partnership Centre on Water and Environment contribute their long-standing expertise on IWRM and data management, among many different areas, with the work being coordinated and technical expertise added by UN Environment’s Freshwater Ecosystems Unit at headquarters in Nairobi.
Figure 1.
In doing so, its aim is to promote human well-being, support inclusive growth, enhance environmental health and reduce risks while improving resilience (Figure 3).
Figure 2.
Find out more and get in touch with us at www.unep.org/ecosystems/freshwater.