Water Week: Scarcity and Waterless Toilets

The size of the problem is daunting: 1.2 billion people live where water is scarce, with another 500 million living in almost similar circumstances. Another 1.6 billion people live near groundwater, but lack the infrastructure to move it from rivers and aquifers. By 2025, 1.8 billion people will be living in regions with absolute water scarcity.

A waterless toilet fuelled by solar power and developed with a grant of $777,000 from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is set to be launched in India during World Water Week. This revolutionary waterless, solar powered toilet is developed by the University of Colorado Boulder and holds the promise to bring a change in the lives of 2.5 billion people around the world who are deprived of safe and sustainable sanitation.

The first recorded water war occurred more than 4,500 years ago in modern-day Iraq, near the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Fought between the neighboring ancient city-states of Lagash and Umma over the region known then as Gu'edena (edge of paradise), the conflict started when the king of Lagash diverted water to canals, depriving Umma from a fresh water supply. This ancient resource war is one of the earliest known organized battles in history.

Throughout history, the Tigris-Euphrates river basin—a lush region known as the Fertile Crescent that helped Mesopotamia become the central power of the ancient world—has been the site of numerous violent, water-based conflicts. 

 Today, the people who depend on the Tigris-Euphrates river system—residents of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Kuwait—are still at loggerheads over their shared water resource. "No river system better demonstrates the nature of hydrological interdependence," argue Kevin Watkins, an expert on human development and globalization, and Anders Berntell, the executive director of the International Water Institute (SIWI), in an op-ed that sharply draws the connection between water scarcity and violent inter-state conflict.

 *http://www.justmeans.com/blogs/worlds-first-waterless-solar-powered-toilet-to-be-launched-with-gates...