Water

Hurricane Helene’s flood waters may have contaminated drinking water across western North Carolina. Residents with overtopped wells must boil and test the water before concluding it’s safe.

Access to water and sanitation are recognized by the United Nations as human rights – fundamental to everyone’s health, dignity and prosperity. However, billions of people are still living without safely managed water and sanitation.

Marginalized groups are often overlooked, and sometimes face discrimination, as they try to access the water and sanitation services they need. Governments must take a human rights-based approach (HRBA) to water and sanitation improvements, so that no one gets left behind.

The deal ends preliminary probes into the use of wells without authorization and fraud for filtering its mineral waters, a practice that is illegal in France where mineral waters are supposed to be natural.

But the project comes shrouded in uncertainty, including its main purpose—whether for shipping or irrigation—who will fund it, and how it will affect the flow of the Mekong—one of the world's longest rivers.

Conservationists have long warned that the river, which supports up to a quarter of the world's freshwater fish catch and half of Vietnam's rice production, is at risk from infrastructure projects, pollution, sand mining, and climate change.

Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand are signatories to the 1995 Mekong River Agreement, which governs the distribution of the river's resources.

While Cambodia is a close ally of Beijing, Hun Sen has denied the canal will be part of China's Belt and Road infrastructure plan.

[ not exactly about water but about what to do when there‘s no water. It‘s Punk, but not stellar ]

The system driving this operation is called district cooling, and its technology long predates this summer’s Olympics. The first system of its kind was built in 1962 in Hartford, Connecticut, and has since grown to be one of the largest in the world. The city’s gas company at the time had connected to all the interstate pipelines, bringing a surplus of gas to the city, which went unused in the summer. So a district energy system was created through which gas could be used to chill water and cool buildings in the summer, and steam for heat in the winter.

Created in 1991, Paris’ district cooling network is already Europe’s largest, currently serving more than 2,000 buildings in the south of the city

Key Ideas

• The Tsimané, Mosetén and Tacana Indigenous ethnic groups in the Bolivian Amazon feared the worst for early 2024. They believed that the cycle of floods would bring misfortune and affect their communities
• However, the water management projects they have implemented have provided favorable results and helped the communities avoid disasters. This is an example of a communitywide effort to commemorate World Water Day 2024, which was March 22.
• Members of these Indigenous communities collect water from several watersheds and transport it through kilometers of pipes so that it reaches their homes, a complex engineering project that also has allowed them to adapt to the more intense droughts and floods caused by climate change.

One of the key demands of the movement to de-privatize water in Chile is that water should be recognized as a human right, which requires infrastructure that ensures clean water and access to it. In addition, we are organizing for the rights of nature and working toward the defense and restoration of hydrological systems not only for human consumption but also so water can flow freely.

It is from this perspective that networks such as the Movement for Water and Territories (MAT), of which I am a part and which links approximately one hundred social and territorial organizations in the territory called Chile, have sought to de-privatize water and decolonize our understanding of nature. We are pushing for an ecological transition that embraces social, climate and water justice and that includes the defense of rivers, lakes, lagoons, wetlands, salt flats, glaciers and other bodies of water.

Chile’s Political Constitution was adopted in the 1980s, and it establishes water in all of its forms as a national good for public use, while also allowing private ownership of it. This was enshrined in the 1981 Water Code, adopted during the civil-military-business dictatorship. Chile’s Water Code created a water market and made water a tradable commodity that can be bought, sold, leased and even mortgaged.

Private ownership of water is made possible through the sale of usage rights. The government grants these rights free of charge and in perpetuity to private parties linked to extractivist industries, such as mining, agribusiness and the forestry industry. Today there are landowners who lack water and others who monopolize water rights without owning land.