More than 2 billion people around the world live without access to safe drinkable water, as rivers, groundwater, lakes and glaciers face continued threats of pollution and overexploitation due to urbanization, environmental destruction, and climate change.
This World Water Day, Mongabay looks back at some of its coverage from 2024 on how local communities are trying to protect the world’s dwindling water resources.
Protecting the Amazon’s headwaters
Mongabay’s short documentary The Time of Water, directed by Pablo Albarenga, follows Indigenous leaders Uyunkar Domingo Peas Nampichkai of the Achuar people from Ecuador and Wrays Pérez Ramírez of the Wampís Nation from Peru as they travel along the tributaries of the Marañón, the main source of the Amazon River. During their journey, they stop at villages to talk to communities, especially the younger generation, about protecting the Amazon Basin from threats posed by mining, logging, and the fossil fuel industry.
“We don’t live without water. That’s why we have to make a great alliance to recover the rivers, the jungle,” Pérez Ramírez says. “Not to extract gold, as the non-Indigenous man wants. Gold is not eaten … Time is now, and we must act fast, because time is not gold. Time is water.”
Restoring a Kenyan riverbank
In Kenya, decades of intense agriculture have stripped the trees in Tana River’s catchment area, resulting in soil washing into the river. This has led to a decline in both water quality and farmland productivity, Mongabay’s Ochieng’ Ogodo reported in October.
Ogodo tells the story of the Upper Tana-Nairobi Water Fund (UTNWF), launched by U.S.-based NGO The Nature Conservancy in 2015 with support from the private sector, civil society and the government. The fund has helped farmers and local authorities in parts of the Upper Tana River create buffer zones along riverbanks to reduce erosion and to reforest degraded areas.
“It is really important to have ecological systems be the foundation of water security. That is why we see the protection and restoration of nature as being critical [to] ensuring our water security,” said Naabia Ofosu-Amaah, a senior adviser on water and climate resilience issues at TNC.
Wetland restored in Zimbabwe
In Harare, Zimbabwe, destruction of the city’s wetlands for new housing developments and poor waste management have resulted in depleted wells and water shortage. The government and residents of Harare have now come together to restore a 34-hectare (84-acre) wetland known as Monavale Vlei, which lies in a catchment area that serves as a primary source of water for the city, Mongabay staff writer Aimee Gabay and contributor Tatenda Chitagu reported.
To do this, full-time staff and community volunteers have been removing invasive plants and identifying and responding to threats such as development proposals.
Recent surveys show that the wetland’s streams are cleaner than nearby wetlands that have been used for cultivation, Gabay and Chitagu write.
Credits
