World Water Day

Yesterday marked World Water Day 2007, when 392,000 children will have died from drinking dirty water and inadequate sanitation so far this year.

Fascinating reading is the UN Development Program's 2006 Human Development Report, which focuses on water scarcity as a critical issue underpinning sustainable development for the majority of the world's poor. Despite its arcane title, do check it out - access to clean, safe, drinking water is, quite simply, a matter of life and death. More than a third of humanity - 2.6 billion people - do not have access to the sanitation that we take for granted in the UK.

Still, there's an interesting tension that I encounter - do I choose to drink tap water, and avoid the environmental costs of bottled water (plastic, transport, purification) that retails at roughly the same price as petrol, or opt for One, a bottled water brand where money is donated to buying merry-go-rounds in Africa that double as water pumps?

The UK Department for International Development has a strategy on increasing access to water and sanitation as part of its work and has just announced increasing aid contributions towards this end. The two lead UK campaigning organisation on global water issues are WaterAid, whose current campaign, End Water Poverty insists that governments provide sanitation and water for the world's poorest people, and the World Development Movement, which is campaigning against the privatisation of public water services in Nepal by British company Severn Trent. Get involved!