AFP: Humanity’s “lifeblood” — water — is increasingly at risk around the world due to “vampiric overconsumption and overdevelopment,” the UN warned in a report, published hours ahead of a major summit on the issue was set to begin yesterday.
The world is “blindly travelling a dangerous path” as “unsustainable water use, pollution and unchecked global warming are draining humanity’s lifeblood,” United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres said in a foreword to the report, released hours ahead of the first major UN meeting on water resources in nearly half a century.
Co-hosted by the governments of Tajikistan and the Netherlands, the UN Water Conference will gather some 6,500 participants, including a hundred ministers and a dozen heads of state and government Wednesday through Friday in New York. Richard Connor, lead author of report, told AFP that the impact of the “world water crisis” will be a “matter of scenarios.””If nothing is done, it will be a business-as-usual scenario — it will keep on being between 40 percent and 50 percent of the population of the world that does not have access to sanitation and roughly 20-25 percent of the world will not have access to safe water supply.”