UN celebrates “World Water Day”

( March 23, 2010) More people die from unsafe water than from all forms of violence, including war, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on World Water Day, celebrated Monday. (March 22). “These deaths are an affront to our common humanity, and undermine the efforts of many countries to achieve their development potential,” Ban said in his message for the Day, which this year had as it’s theme “Clean Water for a Healthy World”.
Ban noted that our growing population’s need for water, for food, raw materials and energy, is increasingly competing with nature’s own demands for water, to sustain already imperilled ecosystems and the services on which we depend. “Day after day, we pour millions of tons of untreated sewage and industrial and agricultural waste into the world’s water systems. Clean water has become scarce and will become even scarcer with the onset of climate change,” added the UN Secretary-General.
In his message, Ban highlighted that water is vitally linked to all UN development goals, including maternal and child health and life expectancy, women’s empowerment, food security, sustainable development and climate change adaptation. As such, the UN General Assembly recognized 2005-2015 as the International Decade for Action “Water for Life.” In doing so, it called for a greater focus on water-related issues at all levels, and for the implementation of water-related programmes to achieve internationally agreed upon goals, including the Millennium Development Goals.