Try to imagine your life without water.
You probably wouldn’t get through the first 15 minutes of your day: You drink water from the faucet, brush your teeth, take a shower. And that’s just the water you see. Water also irrigated the cotton in your pajamas and sheets, produced the energy that powers your bedside lamp, and helped mine the filament in your light bulb. It’s in the coffee and the coffee pot. It’s in the milk and in the alfalfa that fed the cow that produced the milk.
The goal’s inclusion of “sustainable management” underscores the critical role freshwater resources and how they are governed play in people’s lives. Healthy watersheds and wetlands provide the foundation for a clean water supply, flood control, food, and numerous other services on which billions depend for their health and well-being. Failing to secure these natural resources can undermine the value of well-intended development: Taps run dry; toilets pollute drinking water; water storage infrastructure, such as dams and dikes, inadvertently increases communities’ vulnerabilities to extreme weather events; and farms pollute or overconsume water.
Ultimately, the goal is for people around the world to enjoy water and all it provides, to understand how precious it is, and to fight for its ongoing protection. And that is a goal we are proud to work toward.
Guwanch ATAYEW,
student of state energy institute of Turkmenistan.
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