“One must begin with water,” wrote the historian Fernand Braudel, because the provision of water services is one of the foundations for civilization. People and societies want protection from floods and droughts; they want water to drink, to irrigate their crops and to produce clean energy. Brazil is a case in point for how one country has used water as a platform for economic development, …
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Many of us who live in the developed world and in urban areas in the developing world would have a hard time imagining what it would be like to live in an area with open sewers, or no formal sewer facilities whatsoever. And yet, according to the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation (JPM), an estimated 2.5 billion people worldwide did not have access to improved sanitation…
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Most have heard so many times that hydropower is “clean” or “green” energy that they are surprised to learn otherwise. Unfortunately, the reality is much more complicated. Dams, especially those in the tropics, emit significant amounts of greenhouse gases, and to categorically call them “clean” is a mistake.
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The vast Amazon rainforest spans over eight South American countries and covers an area of approximately 6.7 million square kilometers. Thirty million people live in the Amazon, coexisting with about 10 percent of the known wildlife species. The immense network of rivers, lakes and wetlands overlapping this area forms the largest watershed on earth, accounting for 15 percent to 16 percent of the total river discharge into the oceans….
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Seventeen–year–old Erika Ybazeta went to school in the small town of Santa Eulalia in the Peruvian highlands. The town is less than an hour’s drive from Lima, the coastal city of nine million that is the nation’s economic and political center. After graduating, Erika was only able to find work doing subsistence farming on her family’s small parcels of land in the nearby rural community of Cashahuacra. …
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