Sustainability and Water Scarcity.

                                                   Comments due by April 20, 2018

Water inequality is increasing in the world’s most environmentally stressed nations, warn the authors of a report that shows more than 800 million people need to travel and queue for at least 30 minutes to access safe supplies.

Despite an overall increase in provision of tap water, the study - the State of the World’s Water 2018 - charts the gaps within and between nations, as poor communities face competition over aquifers and rivers with agriculture and factories producing goods for wealthier consumers.

While recent headlines have focused on the drought in Cape Town, the NGO WaterAid, which published the report on Wednesday, noted that communities in many other regions have long been used to queues and limited supplies.

By far the worst affected country is Eritrea, where only 19% of the population have basic access to water. It is followed by Papua New Guinea, Uganda, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Somalia, all of which have rates of between 37% and 40%. It is no coincidence that many of these nations have large numbers of refugees living in temporary shelters.

Within countries, there is also considerable variation linked to income and other factors. In Niger, only 41% of the poorest people have access to water, while 72% of its wealthiest do. In neighbouring Mali, 45% of the poor have access to water, compared to 93% of the rich.

“Inequality in access to water is growing primarily as a result of a lack of political will,” said Lisa Schechtman, the director of policy and advocacy for WaterAid.

“There is a risk of leaving people behind, particularly in remote rural areas and among displaced communities.”

Most vulnerable are the old, sick, disabled and displaced people in remote or rural locations.

Gender is also a key factor because woman bear the brunt of the burden of collecting water. The time-consuming task of fetching the UN-recommended 50-litres per day for a family of four takes the equivalent of two and half months each year, the report says.

Collecting water time in school and raises the risks of disease. Children are often the victims, with close to 289,000 dying each year from diarrhoeal illnesses related to poor sanitation.

There have been improvements. The proportion of the world’s population with access to clean water near their home has risen from 81% to 89% since 2000. But this leaves 844 million people with a journey and queues of at least 30 minutes to a safe source.

The greatest progress has been seen in big, fast-growing developing nations. China has seen an extra 334 million people get access to water between 2000 and 2015, followed by India with 301 million.

The biggest proportional gain was in Afghanistan, where a post-war reconstruction effort raised the proportion of people with access to water from 27% to 62% since 2000. Laos, Yemen, Mozambique and Mali have also seen rapid progress.

However, the report notes the world still has much work to do to achieve the UN’s sustainable development goal 6, which is to provide safe water and sanitation to everyone by 2030.

This summer, world leaders will meet in New York to review progress on this and other development targets.

To close this gap, WaterAid is calling for more tax revenue to be mobilised to provide water for the poorest, improved environmental management and support for people who speak out on the UN-recognised right to safe drinking supplies and sanitation.

The problem of access is increasingly complicated by climate change, pollution and a growing global population. A separate report by the UN earlier this week forecast that 5 billion people could face shortages for at least one month a year by 2050.

Jonathan Farr, WaterAid’s senior policy analyst on water security and climate change, said recent droughts highlighted how extreme weather is adding to water stress on the poorest. “Cape Town is a wake-up call, reminding us that access to water, our most precious resource, is increasingly under threat.

“Those marginalised by age, gender, class, caste or disability, or living in a slum or remote rural community, are hardest to reach and will continue to suffer as long as governments do not prioritise and fund access to water for all, and while disproportionate use of water by industry and agriculture continues.”

Geoengineer our way of of Climate Change?

                                                                   Comments due by April 13, 2018

(Which path makes more s  sense: emit GHG and then attempt to clean up by conducting expensive experiments or  limit emissions in the first place?

in            ofGHG ?)

It sounds like the stuff of science fiction: the creation, using balloons or jets, of a manmade atmospheric sunshade to shield the most vulnerable countries in the global south against the worst effects of global warming.

But amid mounting interest in “solar geoengineering” – not least among western universities – a group of scientists from developing countries has issued a forceful call to have a greater say in the direction of research into climate change, arguing that their countries are the ones with most at stake.

Scientists have long known that manmade events like pollution in the atmosphere, smoke from forest fires and volcanic eruptions can create a cooling effect.

That has led scientists at Harvard University to propose their own experiment, which they call “stratospheric controlled perturbation effect”, or SCoPEx for short. It involves using a balloon to test the controversial proposition that aerosols released at a height of 20km in the Earth’s atmosphere can alter the reflective properties of cloud cover.

Now a dozen scholars, from countries including Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Ethiopia, India, Jamaica and Thailand, have joined the debate, arguing in the journal Nature that poor countries should take a lead in the field since they have most to gain or lose from the technology.

The cooling effect has long been known in phenomena such as “ship tracks” – narrow artificial clouds of pollution, created by emissions from ships, that contain more and smaller water droplets than typical clouds, making them brighter and more reflective of sunlight.

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“Solar geoengineering – injecting aerosol particles into the stratosphere to reflect away a little inbound sunlight – is being discussed as a way to cool the planet, fast,” the scientists write in Nature.

“Solar geoengineering is outlandish and unsettling. It invokes technologies that are redolent of science fiction – jets lacing the stratosphere with sunlight-blocking particles, and fleets of ships spraying seawater into low-lying clouds to make them whiter and brighter to reflect sunlight.

“Yet, if such approaches could be realised technically and politically, they could slow, stop or even reverse the rise in global temperatures within one or two years.

In an interview with Reuters, Dr Atiq Rahman, director of the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies and the article’s lead author, amplified his arguments.“The technique is controversial, and rightly so,” they add. “It is too early to know what its effects would be: it could be very helpful or very harmful. Developing countries have most to gain or lose. In our view, they must maintain their climate leadership and play a central part in research and discussions around solar geoengineering.”

“Clearly [solar radiation management geoengineering] could be dangerous, but we need to know whether, for countries like Bangladesh, it would be more or less risky than passing the 1.5C warming goal. This matters greatly to people from developing countries and our voices need to be heard.

“The overall idea [of solar geoengineering] is pretty crazy, but it is gradually taking root in the world of research,” said Rahman.

The solar geoengineering studies may be helped by a new $400,000 (£284,100) research project, the solar radiation management governance initiative (SRMGI), which is issuing a first call for scientists to apply for finance this week.

The initiative is financed by the Open Philanthropy Project, a foundation backed by Dustin Moskovitz, a co-founder of Facebook, and his wife, Cari Tuna.

The fund could help scientists in developing nations study the regional impacts of solar geoengineering, for instance on droughts, floods or monsoons, said Andy Parker, a co-author and project director of the SRMGI.

Rahman said the academics were not taking sides about whether geoengineering would work.

And not everyone is convinced by the prospect of the technology.

In a leaked draft of a report about global warming due for publication in October, a UN panel of climate experts express scepticism about solar geoengineering, suggesting it may be “economically, socially and institutionally infeasible”.