March 22nd means it’s World Water Day again! Established by the U.N., World Water Day has been observed annually since 1993 as a way to raise awareness around protecting the world’s water resources.
According to WorldWaterDay.org, 27 percent of the urban population in the developing world doesn’t have access to piped water at home, and poor people in developing countries pay exponentially more for their water than people in North America.
But water shortages aren’t restricted to any one country or continent. As climate change continues to exacerbate environments around the world, recent droughts seen everywhere from the Amazon to the U.S. may become more frequent and more intense. If you haven’t started making every effort to conserve water, this World Water Day is the best time to start.
Here are some easy tips to start saving water at home, which will likewise lower your water bill. Submit your own tips to conserve water below, or tweet your idea with the hashtag #SaveWater and we’ll add it to the slideshow.
CLICK HERE to see how you can get involved with organizations that are helping to provide clean drinking water to those in need around the world.
Billions of people rely on oceans for food, energy, and recreation. The Census of Marine Life helps monitor the diversity of life in the oceans to better allows us to recognize and anticipate problems.
We can’t measure the impact of global change unless we have a baseline for the biodiversity that exists today. By understanding the existing biodiversity, we can understand the impact of change on it. From there we can craft plans that might be able to mitigate the impact of those changes.
We must act to reduce the threats to sharks caused by over-fishing and over-consumption of shark products and by wasteful practices such as finning and needless bycatch. The tradition of shark finning WILL end. The question remains: will it end before there are no sharks left?
Watch this video to learn more about the illegal fishing of sharks.
With every breath we take, every drop of water we drink, we’re connected to the ocean. It is our life support system, giving us more than half of the oxygen we breathe, regulating climate, and providing valuable resources. (more…)
Climate change has already destroyed about 50 per cent of the world’s corals reefs. Yet approximately 500 million people depend on healthy coral reefs for food and income. Watch this video to learn more.
Each and every one of us is, on average, about 60 percent water. Water is deeply embedded not just in us, but in the global economy, too. And water is the lifeblood of the planet – pulsing through rivers, resting in lakes and trickling through underground aquifers (groundwater sources). Along the way, the flow of fresh water supports remarkable, but increasingly threatened, species and ecosystems. (more…)
But even though such zoning (which experts call “marine spatial planning”) has high-level support within the Obama administration, it’s anything but easy. (more…)
The first draft of global standards intended to measure and identify environmentally and socially responsible salmon farming was recently released for a 60-day public comment period.(more…)
Our oceans are dying, and without life in our oceans, life on land will perish. The threats to our marine environment, our global life support system, come` from many sources, but all have one common cause: human activity. (more…)
March 22nd means it’s World Water Day again! Established by the U.N., World Water Day has been observed annually since 1993 as a way to raise awareness around protecting the world’s water resources.
