Today is World Water Day! I really appreciate this day every year because it’s a day that focuses on the importance of accessible fresh water for everyone. It’s so easy to forget how lucky we are to have an unlimited source of clean, usable water available to us. We have more than enough water to drink, we do our laundry, take daily showers, do our dishes, forget the water’s running (guilty!), and don’t even think about maybe someday not having this luxury.
Today, billions of people do not have access to safe water and 40% of the word’s population is in some way affected by water scarcity. That is a lot of people! And that doesn’t include the animals 🙁 Goal number 6 of the UN’s ‘Sustainable Development Goals’ states that by year 2030 everyone will have access to clean water. Twelve years is not that far away and we have a long way to go to ensure that billions of people have safe water!
This year’s theme for World Water Day is ‘Nature for Water’. This theme was chosen as a way of looking to nature’s resources to help solve today’s fresh water challenges (FINALLY!). Of course nature has a way of creating water-related disasters through droughts, floods, and climate changes, but the more we neglect our ecosystem, the more damage we are creating to our natural resources, like water.
Fresh water is an absolute necessary resource for us to stay alive, therefore you would assume that it’s an indispensable right. Unfortunately, it is still such a large challenge for many countries and the lack of clean water has caused so many other problems to develop for them.
Here is an image of Cape Town, South Africa where they have been in the midst of a serious drought for the last three years. They are racing toward what they are calling ‘Day Zero’ which is the day that all tap’s must be shut off and the people will have to line up to receive allocated amounts of water. This date is currently scheduled for July 9th of this year. Soon enough Cape Town could be known as the first city in the world to run out of water.
So many factors are involved in why there is enough water in some places, too much water in other places, and then not enough water in others. Climate change and water pollution have become the biggest contributors of today’s water crisis and I think that when we finally make the necessary changes to help out our environment, is when we will finally see a positive change to our planet 💚
xx
Lindsey
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