UN Conference on Water Aims to Rally Support for Ambitious Goals
 

The last time the United Nations hosted a conference dedicated to global water supply and sanitation the world looked vastly different. Half as many people were alive. China’s economy was smaller than the United Kingdom’s. And a year colder than the 20th century average was still possible.

It was 1977, a decade of global environmental awakening, when the nations of the world gathered in an Argentine port city to call attention to the vulnerability of water bodies to pollution and overuse. The Mar del Plata conference aimed for wiser management of an essential resource in order to improve environmental health and “promote human dignity and happiness.”

Forty-six years later, the challenges remain. Environmental health and human dignity are again on the agenda. But achieving progress is impeded by growth in farm and factory output and by a warming planet that is unleashing hellacious droughts, ruinous floods, and punishing storms. Industrial farms gulp water and spit out pollutants. Glaciers from the Alps to the Andes are shriveling, drying out alpine towns.

Delegates arriving this week in New York City to take part in the UN’s second international water conference will do so in more frenzied circumstances. Eight billion people now inhabit the planet. China, hoovering raw materials for decades, is the world’s second largest economy, its output more than five times bigger than the UK’s. And global temperatures march steadily upwards.

“The world is a much riskier place than in 1977,” said Quentin Grafton, a water scholar at the Australian National University.

Part pep rally, part trade show, part performance review, the UN Water Conference is pitched by its co-hosts, the governments of the Netherlands and Tajikistan, as an opportunity for the world to recommit to ambitious goals of safely managed water and sanitation for all people and ecosystems.

The centerpiece of the conference, which runs from March 22 to 24, is the “water action agenda,” a compilation of voluntary commitments from national governments, nonprofits, businesses, and intergovernmental agencies. Together these commitments extend beyond the conference walls, pushing leaders to be more careful, inclusive water stewards in the years ahead.

“It’s not what happens in three days,” Grafton said about the goals of the conference. “It’s what happens afterward.”

Multi-Million Dollar Restoration Projects Proposed for the Saginaw Bay Watershed; Paid With Settlement Money From Corporate Polluters

By Lester, Graham, Michigan Radio

A new phase of restoration along polluted areas stretching from Midland to Saginaw to Bay City and beyond is up for public scrutiny. This multi-million dollar plan is likely some of the last new projects being funded by two major settlements with corporate polluters.

Federal, state, and tribal trustees have come up with an extensive plan to spend some of the last of the money from those two huge settlements.

“This round of restoration that we’re asking for public comment on now involves ten new projects,” said Lisa Williams with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS).

The settlement money comes from Dow and GM.

The Dow Chemical Company settled a case in 2020. It agreed to clean-up more than a hundred years of dioxin pollution and restore the Tittabawassee River. The second case was settled with General Motors in 1998. Three GM plants had polluted the Saginaw River and Lake Huron’s Saginaw Bay with PCBs and other toxic chemicals.

Circle of Blue brings our readers to the front lines of the biggest stories around the most important issue on the planet: The world’s water. 

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