Source material and useful links

24/1/2021: Water outages in Syria's northeast are often leaving around half a million people without potable water. Is Turkey using the outages as a weapon to destabilize the region, as some claim?

Source: DW

19/1/2021: For the first time, water was traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in December 2020. Farmers and municipal authorities can now bet on the future price of California water. However, water futures have so far failed to address concerns regarding access to water in developing countries. There is no easy panacea for humanity’s water needs.

Source: Third World Network

14/12/2020: A US-funded project using satellites to track and publish water levels at Chinese dams on the Mekong river has been launched, adding to the superpowers' rivalry in Southeast Asia.

Source: CNA

26/11/2020: The Food and Agriculture Organization’s flagship report notes that available freshwater resources have declined globally by more than 20 per cent per person over the past two decades. Action should focus on the agriculture sector – the world’s largest user of water.

Source: UN News

9/11/2020: Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, a Spanish professor and ecologist, has taken up this voluntary UN position. Exploring the impact of COVID-19 and the climate crisis on water and sanitation will be his first priority.

Source: Devex

11/11/2020: There is a price that both environment and society pay for hydroelectricity. It is therefore not surprising that many organisations advocate against the construction of new dams. They argue that countries in Southeast Asia should rely less on imported hydropower and more on solar, wind, and biomass.

Source: CNA

28/7/2020: Ten years on since the UN General Assembly officially recognized the human right to water and sanitation, 1 in 10 people — 785 million in all — still lack access to clean water close to home. One in 4 people, or 2 billion in total, do not have a decent toilet of their own.

Source: Devex

22/7/2020: The water crisis has forced India's government to try and turn around decades of established farming practices and convince the country's most powerful voting bloc to change the crops they plant. Water-guzzlers like rice and wheat are out, corn and pulses are in.

Source: The Straits Times

12/5/2020: The Mekong River Commission reports that Laos plans to build the Sanakham hydropower plant, with an estimated cost of US$2.073 billion. Objectors say the dams threaten a river system whose fisheries, sediment and seasonal flooding for agriculture support some 60 million people.

Source: CNA

16/3/2020: We just have to make water security our single biggest obsession. Water, remember, is about livelihood. It is about food and nutrition. It is about economic growth. This decade is our make or break phase, says Sunita Narain.

Source: Down to Earth