Water and Human Rights

I got the latest magazine from Heifer International, and they had a story about the U.N.'s Water for Life program. The magazine story and the U.N.'s online resources have reminded me how absolutely central access to clean water is to human rights.

Water, of course, is central to everything we do. We can live only days without it, but it isn't just ingesting that makes water important. Its use in agriculture, livestock rearing, hygiene and even transportation are vital parts of a person's life. The U.N. estimates that over 2 million people die each year from diseases that are due to unclean or contaminated water sources. Most of these deaths are of children who are least able to fight off these diseases.

As more people live in water-scarce areas, other human rights problems arise. People sometimes have to travel great distances to obtain clean water, and this puts them at risk of becoming the prey of bandits, warlords or other criminals in the area. Such dangers are shouldered disproportionately by women, who are often the ones who are charged with fetching water and doling it out for all of a family's needs.

Access to clean water is an imperative and is as much a human rights issue as an ecological or environmental issue. People in developed countries can think of ways to improve the problem, whether by donating to build wells (or traveling somewhere to help dig one!) or just by wasting a little bit less of the water that most of us take for granted.