Happy World Water Day!

This is our 401st post. We want to thank everyone who has taken the time to read, comment and contribute to Enviro Boys over the past two years. It has been real fun side project for the both of us (or as Chris says, "blogospheric experiment") and we hope to continue it going for years to come.

For the past two years, I have written a post on World Water Day (for 2009 see here, for 2010 see here). I have taken the time to sit down and reflect about how lucky I am to be living in a country where clean and affordable water is readily available by the turn of the tap. A feeling of fortune that the water managers and politicians who make decisions about water distribution, treatment, pricing and policy are all somewhat competent at their tasks to ensure that residents receive the water they need.

I also recognize the tremendous equity issues surrounding this fundamental resource. According to the UN, 2.8 million people die every year due to problems with poor water supply, sanitation and hygiene. Worse yet, 2.6 billion people are living without improved access to sanitation facilities. This amounts to a situation where water is simply not treated well and leads to serious water related illnesses including cholera and typhoid fever, for example, due to contaminated water.

Even closer to home we have many First Nations communities that are on boiling water advisories due to poorly treated water. If not boiling water advisories than it's bottled water which is not only an incredibly wasteful resource, but one that is expensive and inexcusable for a country that treats water relatively well. On the quantity front, residents of Vancouver (the city I am currently living in) consume much more potable water per capita than most urban centres in Canada; the average Vancouverite uses approximately 100 litres more per day at home. The Canadian average is about 343 litres per person per day which is 1.5 times more than Europe's residential water consumption.

These are a just a few facts and are not meant to paint a dismal picture. I refer to them to illustrate how critical this resource is to our existence and how unevenly distributed it is globally. We are fortunate in this country to have clean water and should take a moment to be thankful for that. But at the same time we should be asking ourselves what our level of knowledge is about water not only globally but locally. Do you know where your water comes from, where it is treated, how it is priced, the sorts of organizations that work on education and advocacy efforts? If not, it wouldn't hurt to learn. A good starting point to learn about water in Canada is here.

I wrote my honour's thesis on the topic of water. I am taking a graduate level course on water management and planning and I continue to love the resource (other than just academic contexts) for its beauty, its ability to keep me alive and for the aquatic ecosystems it supports.

Happy World Water Day!