Blue_Planet_Run - Part 4 of 5

Agriculture uses 70 percent of all fresh water — three times as much as industry and seven times as much as residential.

There are more than 3,800 multilateral declarations on water: 286 are treaties, referring to more than 200 international river basins.

Workers in the Indian state of Maharashtra bring in the cotton crop.

Worldwide, cotton growing is a $12 billion industry. Its current production of 20 million tons is expected to more than double by 2050. Cotton requires arid growing climates and enormous amounts of water — up to 1 million gallons for every acre or 2,000 gallons for every cotton T-shirt.

Johann Rousselot, Oeil Public

A young girl harvests cotton in the Harran Plain near Sanliurfa in

Turkey. The Ataturk Dam on the Euphrates River stores enough water to allow farmers to irrigate the water-intensive crop in this desert landscape.

Cotton farming in the region is subsidized by a $32 billion project that will eventually result in 22 dams and 19 electrical power stations on the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Aggressive river development in Turkey has led to protests from Syria and Iraq, which also rely on the rivers as primary water sources.

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Dieter Telemans, Panos Pictures

Water: The New Oil 149

  Residents of a New Delhi slum wrestle for control of a water hose from a government water tanker truck. Across India, water networks are in such disrepair that cities cannot provide water from a public tap for more than a few hours a day. Even worse, although most of the 1 billion people worldwide without access to safe drinking water live in rural areas, urban populations of the developing world are expected to double by 2030, as 60 million people move into cities every year. 

Ruth Fremson, The New York Times, Redux

Chen Wenming, his wife, Yang Meitang, and their son, Fernando and Gladys Vega stand behind a collection

Qingyang, are taking advantage of China’s bottled water boom. They

of their kitchen water containers with their children Katy, Alex and

started their own water business, making deliveries by scooter, after

Andres in their Quito, Ecuador home. The Vegas use up to 180

moving from the countryside to Shanghai eight years ago. Bottled

gallons of water daily, well below the national average of 100 gallons

water consumption in China has more than doubled in recent years

per person. The middle-class family conserves water to save money,

because people only limit tap water use for cooking and bathing. The

showering every other day, using the washing machine twice a week

family sells five-gallon jugs — enough for a family of three for about

and watering the garden only on the weekends.

Ivan Kashinsky

two weeks.

Mads Nissen

Jurgen Wernick and Catherina Bosch live in an Abdala Suliman’s family gathers outside their home in

ecovillage in Currumbin Valley in Queensland, Australia. Because

Kafr ad Dik in the West Bank: 92-year-old Issam Amin, and Amin,

their house has no piped water supply, they rely on about 7,000

Mohamed, Ouar and Maen. Every day, for $2, they buy 250 gallons

gallons of rainwater that runs off their roof into tanks every year.

of water from an Israeli-owned well 3 miles from their village. More

The retired couple uses about 30 gallons a day, which would leave

than 10,000 of their fellow villagers also depend on the same supply,

them dry during the year — especially during Australia’s frequent

which leads to a daily scramble. Once the Israeli well owners have

droughts — if they didn’t also recycle water for use in washing their

sold 75,000 gallons, they close up shop for the day.

clothes, watering the garden and filling the toilets.

Alexandra Boulat

Michael Amendolia

Afghanistan was already a nation in trouble before the Tim and Alissandra Sweep and their children David,

United States started bombing in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The

Kara, Erin and Jonathon use around 450 gallons per day in their

country was suffering its worst drought in 30 years, and the Taliban

Henderson, Nevada home, about average for a U.S. household.

had disbanded many women-led hygiene education programs.

Three bathrooms and daily showers give them a level of sanitation

Kabul’s 3.4 million residents have no public sewage system and piped

unknown to half the world. They also have a backyard pool that uses

city water reaches only 18 percent of the people. Mile-long walks to

about 25,000 gallons, enough water to supply a person with the

fetch drinking water are common. Here family members gather on a

U.N. minimum daily water requirement for 12 years.

rooftop to socialize and share what supplies they have.

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Fardin Waezi Water: The New Oil 153

Conservation worker Marco Negovschi takes a break at a Baker, Nevada cafe. Residents are fighting attempts by the city of Las Vegas to build a pipeline for its booming population, which is expected to outgrow the supplies of the Colorado River water by 2013. Local farmers and ranchers worry that the pipeline would leave no water for them.

Tiffany Brown

Water and Wealth Farmers have irrigated the fields around Presidio, Texas, on the

banks of the Rio Grande River, for more than 400 years.

But not much longer. Presidio’s farmers are deserting their fields as the Rio Grande, one of North America’s greatest rivers, has gone dry in this part of Texas as upstream farmers drain off water for their own cotton, corn and alfalfa fields. The Rio Grande is now essentially two rivers, divided by 200 miles of dry riverbed.

It has been said that the real history of the West is the story of who controls the water, from the Colorado to the Columbia, the Missouri to the Sacramento. Today, populations continue to surge, fresh water becomes scarcer, and control is lost in a morass of competing interests among federal and local agencies, farmers, fishermen, Native American tribes and environmental groups.

There are reasons for optimism. Total U.S. water consumption was lower in 2000 than it was in 1980, despite the addition of 55 million new citizens. Per capita water consumption was lower in 2000 than it was a half-century before.

But in the West, even that isn’t enough. Here, any solution must also deal with the ownership and distribution of water. Clever entrepreneurs are buying up vast tracts of the West for their water “capital.” Will they bring greater efficiency to the distribution of the region’s limited supply of fresh water — or just become the latest players in the endless power struggle?

One thing is certain: The long, tragic history of water and wealth in the American West has yet to see its final chapter.

— Michael Malone

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In Nebraska, workers are on the bus by 5 a.m., heading for their jobs in the cornfields. Farming near the Platte River, the site of America’s largest aquifer, involves many laborers and large amounts of irrigation, putting agricultural water needs in competition with wildlife and recreational uses.

Since the mid-1940s, water has been taken from the aquifer three times faster than the rate of recharge, sinking the water table by as much as 5 feet per year in places.

Brian Lehmann

Six years ago Hal Holder and two dozen other farmers in Rocky Ford, Colorado, sold their water rights to Aurora, a fast-growing Denver suburb, kicking off a controversy that hasn’t quieted. Through a program funded by Aurora, Holder is restoring his property to natural grassland. Instead of farming onions, Holder now runs a few head of cattle and offers hunting for quail and pheasant on his property. Other farmers in the area believe the move to sell and ship water was shortsighted and will ultimately hurt the region.

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Sergio Ballivian

Water: The New Oil 157

  Without enough water to satisfy the needs of recreational, agricultural and industrial users, legal battles will frame the future of water use in the United States. Here, attorney Thomas Oliver argues for Spear T Ranch in the Nebraska Supreme Court. The case, which was originally filed in 2002 by the ranch near Bridgeport, accuses groundwater irrigators of depleting area streams. 

Brian Lehmann

Walter and Marie Killidrew, who own a ranch near T. Boone Pickens’s Texas property, are not interested in selling their water rights to him. They are concerned his plan to pump underground water and sell it to users in other parts of the state would dry up their ranch.

Ilkka Uimonen, Magnum

Oil tycoon turned water baron, T. Boone Pickens is making water a hot commodity. He has bought 200,000 acres in Roberts County, Texas, with the idea of selling the water that lies beneath it.

The payoff could be huge: His $75 million investment in land could bring a $1 billion return when he sells the water for $1,000 an acre-foot or more to Texas towns.

Fred Prouser, Reuters, Corbis

If T. Boone Pickens has his way, water will become a cash crop. He is trying to secure the water rights of properties near his ranch and then sell as many as 65 billion gallons a year to thirsty Texas cities.

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Ilkka Uimonen, Magnum

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By some estimates, more than 50 percent of commercial and residential irrigation water use goes to waste due to evaporation, runoff or overwatering.

Landscaping with native plants adapted to the local climate can reduce outdoor water use by up to seven times and can cost 50 percent less to maintain.

A landscaper at the Red Rock Country Club in Las Vegas removes sod in favor of native desert landscaping. With a booming population and tight water supplies, Las Vegas is squeezing water savings from all sectors, recouping 20 billion gallons per year through recycling and rebate programs. Some of the biggest gains come through tearing out turf on the links. According to WorldWatch Institute, golf courses consume 2.5 billion gallons of water worldwide every day, enough to support 500 million people at the U.N.’s five-gallon daily minimum.

Jim Wilson, The New York Times, Redux

Joseph Cooper is replacing his small backyard lawn with artificial turf, and he’s getting paid for doing it. Since 1999, the Southern Nevada Water Authority has offered $2 per square foot to customers to replace their lawns with water-efficient landscaping. Seventy-six million square feet of grass have been removed, saving 5 billion gallons of water per year.

Tiffany Brown

Family members water the grave of Martin Rodriguez, who died of cancer in March 2007 at the age of 42. Families at Mount Carmel Cemetery in El Paso, Texas are able to keep up landscaping thanks to a municipal water recycling program. “Graywater” is also used to irrigate parks, schools, roadside medians and industrial plants. The efforts help the county’s utility cut its annual withdrawals from underground aquifers and the nearby Rio Grande by 1 billion gallons.

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As Florida booms, developments continue their steady march on the Everglades. Here, airboaters run alongside cars on Interstate 595 in West Broward.

Florida’s population increased 13 percent from 2000 to 2006, making it the thirdfastest growing state in the nation. On average, more than 900 people move into the state every day.

Andrew Kaufmann

Poisoning Paradise The Florida Everglades are America’s youngest natural wonder.

Born just 5,000 years ago — a blink in geologic time — the nation’s largest swamp is in fact a vast, slow-moving, 50-mile-wide freshwater river that defines the environment of the entire Florida peninsula. It is also the home to more than 300 species of animals, including birds, foxes, bears and panthers, many of which are unique to the region.

Despite being opened to settlers beginning with the federal Swamp Act of 1850, the vast and forbidding Everglades resisted development until the early 20th century, a half-century after the rest of the state had begun to experience explosive growth. Only then was it determined that the Everglades must be tamed, that the great river needed to be harnessed along its path to the sea to provide water to farms and protect against floods.

Severe drought conditions in Everglades National Park have forced alligators like this 8-footer to seek one of the last remaining puddles of water. Much of the fresh water that was naturally purified by the Everglades now flows directly into the sea, threatening America’s largest coral reef.

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Tim Chapman, Liaison, Getty Images

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In response, in what was considered at the time to be one of the great civil engineering projects of the era, the State of Florida and the Army Corps of Engineers built dams, levees and channels throughout the region — ultimately shunting 1.7 billion gallons of fresh water from the Everglades south to the ocean each day.

The results, as we can only appreciate now, have been devastating.

Draining the Everglades has resulted in catastrophe for the wetlands and its animal and plant life. The channeled water, once pure, has become a dumping ground for fertilizers and pollutants as it makes its way to the coastal waterway — and once there has begun to kill an

As Florida booms, developments continue their steady march on the

equally fragile natural wonder: the Florida Coral Reef.

Everglades. Here, airboaters run alongside cars on Interstate 595 in West Broward.

Florida’s population increased 13 percent from 2000 to 2006, making it the thirdfastest growing state in the nation. On average, more than 900 people move into the state every day.

today regularly suffers from a shortage of fresh water for irrigation and

Andrew Kaufmann

Efforts to restore the Everglades are documented in “Water’s Journey,” a film that follows the path of water from Orlando to the Florida Keys.

In the course of filming the documentary, Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve park biologist Mike Owen, systems biologist Tom Morris and executive producer, director and cinematographer Wes Skiles look for a rare Ghost Orchid in the southern part of the Everglades.

Perhaps the biggest irony of all is that fast-growing southern Florida

Jill Heinerth

drinking — even as those billions of gallons of once-pure water flow past.

Only recently has the region begun to awaken to the magnitude of this natural disaster. And the only cure appears to be for the Corps of Engineers to go back and undo almost everything it has done, freeing the Everglades to cleanse itself, refill the great aquifer that lies beneath it, and once again find its own equilibrium.

But, as the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan underscores, tearing down all of those dams and leveling every levee will be a Herculean task, one requiring billions of dollars in federal and state monies. And so far it remains just a plan: Little funding yet to be set aside for the work.

Saving the Everglades is perhaps the greatest freshwater challenge facing the United States. So far, we are failing the test.

— Michael Malone

Former florida Governor Jeb Bush announces a plan to restore Lake Okeechobee, the largest freshwater lake in the heart of the Everglades. But the Sierra Club questions the governor’s environmental record: “In 2003, the sugar industry successfully petitioned Bush to pass a new law amending the Everglades Forever Act. This anti-Everglades amendment delayed the cleanup of sugar’s phosphorous pollution by 10 years.

Despite massive protests by environmental groups and newspaper editorials of protest, Governor Bush signed the bill into law.”

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Children play on an abandoned water storage tank in Vuma Village in South Africa. Nowadays the village has free access to clean water via an innovative PlayPump system that uses the rotation of a merry-go-round to extract underground water.

Here is the shocker: We already know how to purify water. We don’t yet know how to cure cancer,

and we don’t yet know how to create a vaccine for HIV/AIDS. But we absolutely do know how to purify water. The question then is: If we know how to purify water, why are more than 1 billion people around our planet suffering from the lack of clean water?

I believe it is a failure of imagination. In particular, we have become so enamored with Big Solutions that we have almost forgotten the power of small ones.

Despite having the tools at hand, we are currently losing the battle for universal fresh drinking water — and the world knows it. Thanks to television, the Internet and most of all, cell phones, even the poorest people now know their condition differs from that of others, they know what advances are possible, and they will not be patient for change. Even the hardest heart must appreciate that a billion sick, thirsty, desperate people are the most fertile ground imaginable for war, epidemics, mass refugee migrations and terror. Their thirst is ours. Their problem is ours.

The developing world is littered with press releases and grandiose statements heralding top-heavy one-size-fits-all water projects that came and went, at great expense, while providing little benefit to the people who most need clean water. In some cases, these projects required parts or supplies that were not readily available. Others required skills that were not available locally. In still other cases, the projects required ongoing financial incentives for their operators that, again, were not available.

The second half of the 20th century launched countless huge development projects aimed at solving the planet’s problems on a grand scale, including the lack of water for millions of people. Many failed outright; others were delayed or mismanaged and were magnets for corruption. These development efforts lost the voice, the impetus and the reason of the individual.

Many people around the world are beginning to realize that different problems require different solutions. One great advantage of small-scale projects is that they can be tailored to address specific situations. People do not want solutions that merely keep them alive; they want solutions that make their lives, and the lives of their children, better.

Many solutions will have to be effective against a wide range of contaminants, including dangerous industrial compounds, beyond just the usual problems of sewage and salt. And safe water will only make a difference if it is affordable. The sad fact is that the poor often pay far more than the rich do for water.

This is not only unfortunate and unfair, but also dangerously unhealthy. People use less water when it is more expensive, and when people use less water, their health suffers. And these are the same people who cannot afford medical care.

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Samantha Reinders

The El Paso, Texas, water utility gives customers a $50

I’ll say it again: We already know how to purify water. We’ve known how for millennia — Sanskrit writings from 2000

rebate when they get rid of their old, water-hogging toilets. New models

B.C. record the following advice: “Impure water should be purified by being boiled over a fire, or being heated in the sun,

can save up to 5 gallons per flush. Through incentives, water recycling and

or by dipping a heated iron into it, or it may be purified by filtration through sand and coarse gravel and then allowed to cool.” Add a few technological wrinkles, and that’s essentially what we still do today.

strict conservation ordinances, El Paso residents have reduced their average personal daily usage by 60 percent, from 230 gallons to 136 gallons.

Samantha Appleton

In recent years, we have seen the rise of a new generation of enterprises, commercial and social, led by extraordinary individuals who have found real solutions to seemingly intractable global problems. Bankers such as Nobel Prize winner Mohammad Yunus are fighting extreme poverty by providing loans to people with no credit. Economists such as “The Mystery of Capital” author Hernando de Soto are working with governments to provide even the poorest individuals with formal titles to their land. And businesspeople such as GrameenPhone founder Iqbal Quadir are providing small entrepreneurs with productivity tools (in his case, cell phones) that allow individuals to serve their communities while making attractive profits.

The success of these pioneers is infectious. Individuals around the world are becoming increasingly aware that they can make a difference. There will always be a place for Big Solutions, but they should only be the last resort, when they can prove a greater chance of success than smaller, more adaptive strategies.

Real success only comes with real risk — and real risk means the ever-present possibility of failure. We desperately need to try dramatically new approaches to the challenge of safe water — and many of those approaches will fail. But if we are determined (and lucky), a few of these new solutions will work. This is what inventors and entrepreneurs do. They accept failure as part of the process, they learn from their mistakes, and they keep trying until they find a solution.

What will the solution to making the world’s water safe again look like? I have my own ideas, but I am just one inventor among what should be millions. My hunch is that the answer (or answers) will not be the expected one, or come from even the expected source. It may not be a sophisticated device emerging from a well-equipped lab in the developed world, but an astonishingly elegant solution discovered by some new, young entrepreneur or scientist in Rio, Dharavi or Kibera. Or, it may come from you.

Freed to think small, to make mistakes and to take real risks, we will find the solution to the challenge of safe water. Of that I am certain.

— Dean Kamen

The New York-based Acumen Fund, headed by Jacqueline Novogratz, is helping farmers lift themselves out of poverty by providing funding to IDE-India. IDE, or International Development Enterprises, recruits machine shops to manufacture low-cost drip irrigation systems. Indian farmers have bought 200,000 of the systems and report that their annual return on investment ranges from 40 percent to 64 percent. The KB-Drip system kits are sold through a network of village dealers for $1.30 a pound, of which 36 cents is the seller’s markup. This for-profit approach is transforming the lives of farmers in rural areas throughout the developing world.

Atul Loke

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The energy generated by the children playing on this merry-go-round in the village of Vuma, South Africa, pumps water from an underground borehole up to a storage tank. Billboards on the tank carry public-service messages on two sides; the other two have advertisements that help pay for maintenance of the PlayPump system. Besides being fun — and a source of healthy exercise — the kids are proud to be providing a valuable community service.

Samantha Reinders

Distilling Laughter In Africa, water for basic drinking needs is often available beneath people’s feet; they just aren’t able to reach it.

Instead, every year women and childen spend more than 40 billion hours (yes, billion) walking great distances to

fetch water, devoting much of their days to this arduous

and time-wasting daily ritual. To address this tragic waste

of human potential, teams of entreprenuers and global aid groups have been focusing on human-powered pumps to transform a labor-intensive chore into child’s play.

Two innovative approaches recently won funding from the World Bank’s Development Marketplace Awards.

PlayPump International’s water pump started a decade ago in South Africa and is already in more than 700 villages.

The pump is powered by the energy of children as they

play on a merry-go-round. As they spin, water is drawn

from below ground into a nearby storage tank. The Case Foundation, headed by Steve and Jean Case, is leading a

global campaign to provide PlayPumps to 4000 villages by 2010, which will provide clean water to 10 million people.

One of the most striking aspects of the PlayPump concept is that it was created in Africa by Africans for Africans.

The second device getting worldwide attention is The

Elephant Pump, a modern adaption to an ancient Chinese

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By 2025, two thirds of the world’s people are likely to be living in areas of acute water stress.

Before the

By 2025, two thirds of the world’s people are likely to be living in areas of acute water stress.

PlayPump was installed in Vuma Village, women and

children had to walk long distances to get the water they needed for the day, spending hours lugging heavy buckets on their heads. Because of the weight and frequent injuries, only water for essential purposes was fetched; water for gardening was out of the question. Today the pump system enables the community to irrigate and maintain a small vegetable garden. Here Violet Baloyi tends to her marog, a type of spinach.

Samantha Reinders

water-raising device. The Elephant Pump draws water

through a pipe using plastic washers attached to a rope.

Again, eager children do most of the work by peddling

a stationary bicycle. Pump Aid, the British organization

behind the devive, has installed thousands of the pumps, mostly in Zimbabwe. The pump costs a fraction of traditional piston-powered pumps thanks to the cooperation of local manufacturers.

Even when it’s dry and dusty in Vuma Village, the PlayPump brings water up from underground, and there’s plenty to go around. The whole operation takes only a few hours to install and costs around $14,000. The idea has proved so inventive, so cost-efficient and so much fun for the kids that the World Bank honored it as one of its best new grassroots ideas.

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Samantha Reinders

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According to U.N. estimates, 443 million school days are lost to waterborne diseases each year.

The number of girls attending school rises 15 percent in the developing world when adequate sanitation is available.

Children in developing countries often are afraid of using

rudimentary toilets like outhouses because the facilities are dark and smelly and because the youngsters fear falling into the hole. At Saint Joseph School in Tholurpatti village in India, approximately 235 children up to the age of 6 use child-friendly toilets while enjoying colorful drawings on the walls and a sense of cleanliness. At first, mothers went with their children and taught them the basic ideas of toilet use and hygiene (including washing hands with soap). WaterAid provided the funding for these toilets.

Tomas Munita

Less than half of Asia’s population has access to adequate sanitation, by far the lowest

percentage in the world. In rural areas only 1 in 3 have access. Here children at the Kasichetty Municipal Middle School in Tiruchirappalli, India, learn the importance of hygiene in preventing illness. Simple lessons in hand washing and the installation of public toilets are transforming the lives of India’s rural children.

Tomas Munita

Children get their own area to use in community toilets that are nicknamed “television toilets” because some of them do, in fact, have TVs in them. The privately run centers have become tourist attractions in places like Cheetah Camp, one of Mumbai’s biggest slums.

A World Bank loan gets the project started, but locals decide how big the toilet will be and what amenities it will have. Three hundred toilets have been built where there previously had been open defecation, and people are getting used to living without the stink.

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Water-related diseases caused by unsafe water and inadequate sanitation are responsible for 80 percent of all sickness in the developing world.

Access to clean water gives sub-Saharan Africa's 25 million HIV/AIDS patients a fighting chance to extend their life expectancy.

Two boys in southern Sudan use straw-shaped guinea worm

filters supplied by the Carter Center to protect themselves from the larvae responsible for guinea worm disease. This parasitic disease is painful and debilitating, and its effects reach far beyond a single victim, crippling agricultural production and reducing school attendance. The Carter Center has distributed millions of these straws in recent years, reducing infestations by 70 percent.

Michael Freeman, Aurora Photos

Procter & Gamble’s water purification product, PUR, filters water of debris, viruses,

bacteria, protozoa and arsenic. Sold in individual sachets, PUR costs around 10 cents to treat the drinking water for a family of five for one day and reduces the incidence of diarrhea in young children by around 50 percent.

Stephen Digges

There are a thousand people living in Guanyinjiao Village in Wenzhou City, China,

and until the summer of 2007 they only had one source of water: a local reservoir that delivered untreated water. Many of the families had come to distrust that water, however, and they blamed it for an increasing number of illnesses. The Dow Chemical Company has donated a water treatment center that is capable of removing a variety of contaminants. It uses membrane technology, a system that allows pure water to pass through strands of polymer fibers but traps pollutants.

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On average, 33 percent of Florida's wastewater injection facilities leak into the state's aquifer.

To reduce the impact of residential water use, new installation of low-flow toilets, showerheads and faucets became federal law in the United States in 1992.

Roy Barghout (right) is a research supervisor at Caroma, an Australian company developing improved low-flow toilets. Caroma’s toilets use only three-quarters of a gallon of water to flush, compared to standard low-flow toilets that use more than a gallon and a half.

Michael Amendolia

On mountains an hour or so outside Mexico City, Imelda Carreon Valdozino looks at the water flowing past her on the sides of the dormant volcano in the Tlalmanalco region and wonders what she will find today.

Several times a month, this "Guardian of the Volcanoes" takes a group of students with her as she tests the water for the presence of toxins. Urbanization has brought more people and more industry to the area, intensifying the demand for clean water. Still, there are few treatment facilities in the region, and wastewater runoff is returned to rivers and streams untreated. Then, it sinks through the permeable volcanic soil and threatens to spoil the aquifer beneath Mexico City. The "Guardians" measure pollution and confront the polluters in an effort to safeguard the rivers and streams.

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By 2025, two thirds of the world’s people are likely to be living in areas of acute water stress.

Brand Aid Thirty-eight-year-old creative director David Droga of Australia has spent his career creating advertising campaigns for the world’s top brands. But ask him about the campaign he takes the most pride in these days, and he’ll point to the Tap Project, created to help UNICEF provide clean drinking water to children.

The Tap Project was sparked when Esquire magazine editors challenged Droga to create a brand out of nothing that could also be “a positive change agent.” Inspiration struck when Droga received a complimentary glass of tap water at a restaurant. He gave his team at his company the task of creating a brand for something that is distributed everywhere but that no one owns, something that would cost nothing to produce or package, and something that could generate a lot of money for UNICEF at almost no cost to the donors.

The campaign’s initial target was the citizens of Manhattan. All New Yorkers had to do was add a dollar to their dinner checks. One dollar. Enough to provide clean, safe water for 40 children for a day.

Three hundred of New York’s finest restaurants signed on, and the city’s most prominent magazines published Tap essays by top authors. Students created and hung Tap posters around the city. Dozens of public figures, including actress Sarah Jessica Parker and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, became Tap representatives. All of New York embraced the project.

Suddenly tap water became a brand. Millions of dollars were generated for UNICEF at zero cost.

UNICEF plans to roll out the Tap Project in more than 30 cities in North America on World Water Day in 2008. In 2009 TAP will launch in more than 100 cities around the world.

“This single idea will literally save millions of children’s lives,” says UNICEF’s Steve Miller.

Rick Smolan

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Women and girls in the developing world often spend the majority of their day collecting water and carrying containers weighing up to 45 pounds almost 4 miles.

According to the World Health Organization, more than 1 billion people gained access to clean water over the last decade.

Alice Malemela, 15, of Mothapo Village in South Africa pulls a Q Drum on her way to the community water tap. The innovative plastic drum serves as a rolling water bucket and stores up to 20 gallons when full.

Samantha Reinders

South African architect Piet Hendrikse has put his civil engineering career on hold to begin another in social entrepreneurship. With the help of his brother Hans, he designed and self-funded the Q Drum water-fetching container. Now, he hopes to find a material that will make it both durable and affordable. Although the design has been highly regarded, and the social benefits are clear, the Q Drum's current $30 production cost prevents the product from being used more widely. "Our initial marketing drive was [targeted] to aid organizations, but we have come to the realization that if the distribution of our product is exclusively dependent on charity, the project will not be sustainable." Hendrikse remains optimistic that successful field testing will inspire international funding to overcome manufacturing limitations and make it affordable to the people of rural Africa who need it most.

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FogQuest, a nonprofit Canadian charity, is dedicated to installing water projects serving rural communities in developing countries. Fog collectors make use of natural atmospheric sources of water: As fog blows through the nets, it condenses and is channeled into reservoirs, providing villages with free water. Here a team installs fog catchers in Nepal.

Tony Makepeace

Out of Thick Air Some parts of the developing world receive as little as .04 inches of rainfall per year. In such places, there are no rivers or lakes, people cannot collect enough rainwater to drink, and long-distance transport of water is prohibitively expensive.

Building on a technology developed in the coastal desert of Chile by a team of Chileans and Canadians, the fog catcher system is ideally situated for arid or seasonally arid locations where conventional water supplies are not available.

Fog catchers utilize dense fog — low-hanging clouds — to produce large amounts of water for rural inhabitants in the most arid parts of our planet. The perfect environment for a fog catcher installation is at high elevations where the fog is driven by wind moving over hills.

The fog collectors are made of inexpensive, durable plastic mesh, with fibers woven to maximize passive fog drop interception and to allow for rapid drainage of the collected water. Because the mesh can be supported by local material such as wood, the cost of the collector is low and little maintenance is required. The light, compact nature of the mesh makes it easy to ship and carry, thus facilitating the placement of collectors in poor and isolated communities.

Through these collector systems, clean water is provided to remote communities that lack rivers, lakes and springs and the financial wherewithal to purchase water elsewhere.

FogQuest, a Canadian nonprofit organization that installs fog catchers around the world, says that in its first year of operation in the Chilean village of Chungungo, the system provided between 4,000 and 26,000 gallons of water a day. The village no longer had to import water by truck and had enough to begin growing gardens and fruit trees.

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When clouds touch the Earth in the form of fog, material stretched across hillsides captures the moisture, providing a natural source of fresh, clean water.

Tony Makepeace

Various fabric configurations are tested to see which collect water most effectively.

Manufacturers use the science of biomimicry to design nets resembling naturally occurring patterns.

For instance, a British firm is manufacturing a model inspired by a Namibian beetle that can capture 10 times more water than any previous version.

Tony Makepeace

Fogquest reports that in its first year of operation, the system provided between 4,000 and 26,000 gallons of water a day in some villages.

Villagers no longer had to import water by truck and had enough to begin growing gardens and fruit trees.

Tony Makepeace

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A quarter of the world's glaciers, which provide drinking water to more than 1 billion people, could be gone by 2050 due to global warming.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation made donation commitments of $60 million for water projects in 2006.

Glaciers that provide Europe with drinking water (and ski slopes) have lost more

than half their volume in the last century. Workers at the Pitztal Glacier ski resort in Austria are doing something to slow the melting. On a sunny day, they attach a fleece-like blanket to the top of the slope, push it over the lip and roll it down over the glacier’s flank. The synthetic material protects the snow from the sun’s rays and helps slow the melting in summer months.

Melissa Farlow

At 11,000 feet on Austria’s Pitztal Glacier, 15 acres of cutting-edge insulation is draped onto

sheer slopes — at a cost of $85,000 — to keep them from melting. Glaciers in the Alps are losing 1 percent of their mass every year and may disappear by the end of the century. Less ice and snow cover means less runoff to feed Europe’s major rivers and a loss to the region’s ecosystem as well as to its economy. Glacier wrapping is now being tried in Germany and Switzerland.

Melissa Farlow

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Cities around the world, from Shanghai to Mexico City, are sinking by as much as 30 feet as a result of the overpumping of the aquifers beneath them.

Micro-loans from the Nobel Prize-winning Grameen Bank in Bangladesh have helped well over half of its recipients gain access to safe drinking water.

Manimala, a researcher with an Indian health and sanitation organization called Gramalaya, collects data in the village of Mettupatti, noting the number of people and the location of toilets, wells and water taps. The information will be used to help determine where new sanitation facilities will be built. Many people in India’s rural villages must use open defecation troughs, which contribute to the spread of disease.

Tomas Munita

Children try out the new tap that dispenses water from a PlayPump in Pudhupalli, replacing the old hand pump right next to it. Pudhupalli is the first rural village in India to remove all open sewers.

Tomas Munita

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