This is an extended version of the eight categories of the Basic Human Dignity Needs Holistic Index, with over 600 sub-categories.
Basic Human Dignity Needs include:
ENVIRONMENT - WATER ISSUES
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FROM: www.enn.com
Tackling world's water crises would cost up to US$100 billion a year, says U.N. official
Thursday, March 06, 2003
By Kenji Hall, Associated Press
TOKYO -- Most of the world's water crises can be resolved but would require political will and spending from US$50 billion to $100 billion a year, the United
Nations' top envoy on water issues said Wednesday.
Gordon Young, coordinator of the Paris-based U.N. World Water Assessment Program, warned that crises ranging from contaminated drinking water to
polluted rivers and underground reserves threaten the lives of tens of thousands of people every day.
According to U.N. statistics, more than 200 million people every year suffer from water-related diseases, and about 2.2 million of them -- mostly the poor --
die. About 20 percent of the Earth's population of 6 billion lacks access to safe drinking water.
"If we were to take relatively small amounts of extra money, we could more or less solve most of the world's water problems," Young told a news conference at
the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan. "The difficulty is having the political will to do it."
Young, who was in Tokyo to present the 600-page U.N. World Water Development report ahead of the Third World Water Forum in Kyoto later this month,
said the scale of the problem is enormous.
To reach the United Nations' goal of halving the number of people without access to water for nourishment and hygiene by 2015, every day 270,000 people
would have to be provided with safe drinking water and 340,000 people would have to see improvements in sanitation, Young said.
In the report, the United Nations predicted as many as 7 billion people in 60 countries could face a water shortage by 2050 -- when the global population is
expected to reach 9.3 billion -- as climate changes aggravate droughts or increase rainfall and temperatures.
As natural sources are tapped to near limits, international conflicts over water rights may boil over, the report said.
Disagreements over water underlie the hostilities between states, from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the Middle East to the Colorado River in the United
States and Mexico to the Nile River, which runs through nine African countries, said Young.
The U.N. report also divides countries into those with water resources and those without. Kuwait, the Gaza strip, the United Arab Emirates, the Bahamas, and
Qatar have the least fresh water reserves per person among 180 countries and territories assessed. And -- with the exception of the U.S. state of Alaska and
Denmark's Greenland -- French Guiana, Iceland, Guyana, Suriname, and Congo have the most.
Source: Associated Press
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