Efforts are now underway to clean up the Nullah Lai stream, which has become a dumping ground for Rawalpindi.

This cliff that was once submerged in the Aral Sea now shows the shrinking sea's previous water levels (Photography by Shanoza Karimbabaeva).

Choked uncovered manholes are common in Lahore, and sanitation workers are putting themselves in danger everytime they try to enter and unclog them.

Villagers join hands to rehabilitate their water system.

Villagers join hands to rehabilitate their water system.

 

 

   The villages – now technically parts of two different nations – are located in the Ferghana Valley and are separated by a thin line on the map marking the Kyrgyz-Uzbek border. The boundary was redrawn in 1991 following the collapse of the former Soviet Union. 

   Today Burgandy on the Kyrgyz side is part of Nooken district in Jalal-Abad province and Madaniyat lies in Pahta-Abad district of Andijan province of Uzbekistan.

   Both villages are supplied by a 500 cubic metre tank built in 1985 or when it was one. The tank which around 300 metres from both settlements is fed by four wells – two on the Uzbek and two in the Kyrgyz side.

This cliff that was once submerged in the Aral Sea now shows the shrinking sea's previous water levels (photography by Shahnoza Karimbabaeva).

 

 

   The brighter sides of the display depict what the Aral used to be until a few decades ago – crystal clear waters and a largely un-tampered landscape that used to be haven for many rare animals, bird and fish species. 

   The exhibition, entitled “From Barsa-Kelmes to Vozrozhdeniye,” – roughly translating as “from the land of no return to renaissance” – is part of the efforts to raise awareness about the deteriorating situation of the Aral Sea.

   Barsa-Kelmes, an island off the north-western shore of the Aral lies in Kazakhstan and has a sanctuary which is home to the Asiatic wild ass, Persian gazelle and several other species.

   The other island Vozrozhdeniye is shared by Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and used to be a test site for Soviet biological weapons – anthrax, tularemia, plague, typhus, Q fever, botulinum toxin, and Venezuelan equine encephalitis.

BUENOS AIRES (IPS) - Fed up with poor water quality, rate hikes and a lack of investment in expanding infrastructure, residents, union members and environmentalists in the Argentine province of Córdoba have forced a multinational corporation to withdraw from the business, and are now demanding that the state play a part in a new public water company. 

BONN (IPS) - The United Nations marked June 17 as the World Day to Combat Desertification to focus on the devastating consequences of land degradation. 

   "The issue is often obscured by a common misperception: that it is a 'natural' problem of advancing deserts in faraway developing countries," says Hama Arba Diallo, executive secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). 

Efforts are now underway to clean up the Nullah Lai stream, which has become a dumping ground for Rawalpindi.

 

 

   “I know its wrong but I am forced to do it,” he utters hesitantly. “There is no proper place to throw waste and we can not go out of city for the purpose,” he adds. 

Choked uncovered manholes are common in Lahore, and sanitation workers are putting themselves in danger everytime they try to enter and unclog them.

 

 

   Three employees of Water and Sanitation Agency (WASA), Lahore, were killed in a sewer in the city's Gawalmandi area on May 18. All three did not have basic safety gear when their supervisor asked them to enter the sewer. 

TEGUCIGALPA (Tierramérica) - The construction of El Tigre dam on the Lempa River, which forms a border between Honduras and El Salvador, has unleashed a wave of contradictory opinions. Some claim there will be a loss of sovereignty over natural resources, while others say the resulting reservoir will prevent another war between the two countries, this time over water. 

·         The Danube River Basin (DRB) covers an area of 801,463 km2, making it the second largest river basin in Europe, after the Volga.
·         The Danube is 2,870 km long and up to 1.5 km wide, with a depth of up to 8 meters.
·         This river originates in the Black Forest in Germany as two smaller rivers—the Brigach and the Breg—which join in the city of Donaueschingen. From there on it is known as the Danube. It flows eastwards emptying into the Black Sea via the Danube Delta in Romania.
·         The DRB is the world's most international river basin as it covers parts or all of 18 states comprising Albania, Austria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro, the Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Switzerland and Ukraine. Following the independence of Montenegro, which was voted recently, the river basin will cover 19 states.
·         Some countries such as Austria, Hungary, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro and the Slovak Republic are almost completely situated within the DRB, whereas less than 5% of the territories of Albania, Italy, Macedonia, Poland and Switzerland lie in the basin.
·         The Danube River Basin is home to 81 million people with a wide range of cultures, languages and historical backgrounds. More than 26% of the overall basin population is Romanian. This is by far the largest population group in the DRB, followed by populations from Germany, Hungary, and Serbia and Montenegro.
·         There are 26 major tributaries of the Danube River, all of which have their own sub-basins. The Tysa (also called Tisza or Tisa) River Basin is the largest sub-basin in the DRB (157,186 km2). It is also the Danube’s longest tributary (966 km). The Sava River is the largest Danube tributary by discharge (average 1,564 m3/s) and the second largest by catchment area (95,419 km2).
·         In the DRB, there are several freshwater lakes of varying sizes. The most prominent are the ‘Balaton’ in Hungary (605 km2) and the ‘Neusiedlersee’ (also called Fertö tó), which is shared by Austria and Hungary (315 km2).
·         The Danube River is the single most important contributor to nutrient pollution in the Black Sea.

Oarsmen rowed the royal barges down the Chao Phraya River past the Grand Palace during the celebrations marking the Thai monarch's 60 years on the throne.

Waiting for water at public taps in some parts of Bangalore is a continuous affair, so much so that such containers are found throughout the day.

People queue up to get water at the plant, even though the quality of the water cannot be guaranteed.

Bulldozers busy at work constructing the Turkmen Lake (picture taken from the website Turkmenistan: the Golden Age (www.turkmenistan.gov.tm)

Thanks to newly installed water pumps, village women now do not have to waste so much time and effort fetching water anymore.

BROOKLIN, Canada (IPS) - Canada's leading scientific society on climate called for urgent government action on climate change at its most recent national conference in early June. 

   Stronger and more frequent hurricanes in summer and stronger winter storms are clearly the result of climate change, according to new scientific studies reported at the 40th annual Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (CMOS) congress in Toronto. 

People queue up to get water at the plant, even though the quality of the water cannot be guaranteed.

 

 

   The Capital Development Authority (CDA) has set up 12 filtration plants but the systems are rarely maintained, and are therefore ineffective in terms of pollution control.

On average, Bangalore receives nearly 3,000 MLD of annual rainfall of which experts say 20-50 percent can be harvested for household use.

   The Rainwater Club, a non profit organisation, has set up a harvesting model at the Raj Bhavan – the residence of the Governor, the state’s top official – and the building does not have to rely on the BWSSB supply anymore.

Waiting for water at public taps in some parts of Bangalore is a continuous affair, so much so that such containers are found throughout the day.

 

 

   As if the crippling traffic of India’s ‘Silicon Valley’ and slow infrastructure growth were not enough, Bangalore now faces an additional problem to reckon with – an acute shortage of drinking water.

   Hand pumps have come as a boon to minority groups – especially to those considered ‘untouchables’ – whose woes were many times greater than the privileged ones.

   Like others, they had to travel long distances but were not allowed to fill their pitchers directly from the source. They had to wait for others to come, fill water and then pour it into their containers.

Thanks to newly installed water pumps, village women now do not have to waste so much time and effort fetching water anymore.

 

 

   "As far as I can remember, I was always fetching water," says Najma Ramzan, a 39-year-old mother of seven of Qadir Bux Chango village in the district of Sanghar in Sindh province, some 250 kilometres from Pakistan’s southern port city of Karachi.

   Fetching water is considered "a woman’s job" in rural Pakistan and it used to take the roughly 45 women of Najma’s village almost an hour to walk to the source and return home with filled pitchers balanced on their heads.

   This had been Najma’s routine for as long as she can remember – she made as many  as eight trips a day in illness, pregnancy or good health.

   Her life began changing about a year ago when a non-governmental organization helped the villagers install hand-pumps. 

BEIJING (IPS) - China is claiming a partial victory in slowing the spread of encroaching deserts but has admitted that the centuries-old war to stop the sands eating up farmland will probably never be won completely. 

   The approaching 2008 Olympic Games, which Beijing has promised will be "green", has inspired the government to launch ambitious, expensive programmes to combat desertification. 

Deserts are arid regions, generally receiving less than ten inches of precipitation a year, or regions where the potential evaporation rate is twice as great as the precipitation.

The world's deserts are divided into four categories.

Subtropical deserts are the hottest, with parched terrain and rapid evaporation.

Although cool coastal deserts are located within the same latitudes as subtropical deserts, the average temperature is much cooler because of frigid ocean currents.

An open stretch of drain that passes through the Model Colony Number 2 slum has claimed six lives so far.

Before the arrival of the low-cost toilets, villagers used this field for open defecation.

The Sindh irrigation department has deployed Rangers to prevent water theft and misuse and provide protection to its field staff.

UNITED NATIONS (Tierramérica) - Several environmental groups are demanding an international moratorium on bottom trawling, a fishing technique that destroys seabed ecosystems. But the proposal did not win consensus amongst the delegates taking part in a UN conference on fish stocks. 

    Many participants in the first meeting for review of the United Nations Agreement on Fish Stocks, signed in 1995, recognised that bottom-trawling is an issue of concern, but they proved to be indecisive about how to tackle it. 

TOKYO (IPS) - Japan is defiantly preparing for the annual meet of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), in the West Indies this June, by going on a promotion drive for whale meat and other products. 

   A whale meat festival held at the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, in May, featured gourmet dishes such as whale sashimi, sushi, stews and a host of frozen and canned items. 

MEXICO CITY (Tierramérica) - Deserts are advancing in Latin America and the Caribbean, where they already cover some five million square kilometres -- almost a quarter of the region. Although there is concern about this phenomenon, new studies suggest that arid lands also can generate wealth. 

   These ecosystems have the potential to produce electricity based on solar energy and attract tourism. Furthermore, there are indications that dryland flora and fauna contain genetic resources that can be used to fight human illnesses, such as uterine cancer.