One Monday morning, nine-year-old Junjun woke up early because he didn’t want to be late in going to school. He went straight to the kitchen and drank the tap water from the faucet. He then took a bath, wore his uniform, and went straight to the table to eat the food his mother had prepared.
While at school at nine o’clock, Junjun complained of a stomach ache. His teacher told him to go home. Just a few blocks away, the boy did. His mother was surprised to see his son coming home too early. “What happened?” she asked.
Before Junjun could answer, he went straight to the comfort room. When Junjun did it three times, his mother became worried. So, she decided to bring her son to a nearby hospital. “Diarrhea, that’s what hit your boy,” the doctor told her.
Junjun was lucky. Each year, 1.8 million children die each year from diarrhea – that’s 4,900 deaths each day. “Every 8 seconds, a child dies from a water-related disease,” deplored the Geneva-based World Health Organization. “At any given time, half of the world’s hospital beds are occupied by patients suffering from a water-related disease,” it added.
In the Philippines, where water is becoming a scarce commodity, water-related diseases are bound to stay.
President Rodrigo Duterte has called for a “bolder vision” and “urgent action” to solve water-related issues in the Asia-Pacific region, saying developing countries like the Philippines still face challenges
To ensure people’s universal access to safe, affordable and accessible water, President Rodrigo R. Duterte has called for a “bolder vision” and “urgent action.” He said those recommendations in a video message delivered during the heads of states and government meeting at the 4th Asia-Pacific Water Summit in Kumamoto City, Japan.
As reported by the state-run Philippine News Agency (PNA), the outgoing president said countries in Asia-Pacific and its partners must forge “a strong alliance” to address water woes in the region.
“Now is the time for bolder vision and urgent action,” Duterte stressed. “We need to decide wisely for ourselves and for future generations.”
According to Duterte, solutions to water-related issues must not come from the government alone but also from non-government stakeholders as well.
Access to water and its related services, Duterte said, is rightly considered a basic human right, since it is a resource so vital for humans and ecosystems for survival and sustenance.
During her term as head of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), Elisea Gozun pointed out: “On a macro-level, it appears there is plenty of water, but we are now experiencing problems and, in some instances, some areas (of the country) are (now) suffering from lack of water.”
A recent study released by the environment department estimated that only 1,907 cubic meters of fresh water are available to each Filipino a year. This puts the Philippines at the low end among Southeast Asian countries with fresh water availability.
Each day, Filipinos consume 310 to 507 million cubic meters of water.
“A household of five needs at least 120 liters per days to meet basic needs – for drinking, food preparation, cooking and cleaning up, washing and personal hygiene, laundry, house cleaning,” wrote David Satterthwaite and Gordon McGranahan in their collaborative report published in the State of the World 2007.
Although water is a renewable resource, it is also a finite one. Less than three percent of the world’s water is fresh, and more than 75 percent of this is frozen – mainly at the North and South Poles.
Of the remaining freshwater, 98 percent lies underground. People and land-dwelling animals can only access about 0.01 percent of the entire world’s water.
Water is drawn in two fundamental ways: from wells, tapping underground sources of water called aquifers; or from surface flows – that is, from lakes, rivers, and man-made reservoirs.
About 2,000 cubic kilometers of freshwater are flowing through the world’s rivers at any one time; nearly one half the total is in South America and another one fourth is in Asia.
“We cannot talk of providing sustainable water to the people unless we protect the sources of the commodity – the watersheds,” Gozun was once quoted as saying.
In a report a couple of years ago, the DENR said that 90 percent of the 99 watershed areas in the country were “hydrologically critical” due to their degraded physical condition.
Massive destruction of the once-productive forested watersheds by loggers – both legal and illegal – and uncontrolled land use from mining, overgrazing, agricultural expansion, and industrialization have contributed to water depletion.
Because most people are now health conscious, they prefer to drink bottled water. Although its contents might appear the same everywhere, bottled water essentially comes in three different forms: natural mineral water, spring water, and purified water.
Most consumers assume that water purchased in a bottle is better regulated, purer, or safer than most tap water. But is it?
“While the sources of these waters are protected from pollution, since the water is not disinfected it can contain naturally occurring bacteria,” writes The Green Guide’s Paul McRandle. “And though bottlers guard against it, contamination is always possible.”
“The world has got a very big water problem,” says Sir Crispin Tickell, former British ambassador to the United Nations and one of the organizers of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. “It will be the progenitor of more wars than oil.”
