Water quality

Valuing Regional Water Supply Planning and Conservation Alternatives

Water for Life: Addressing a 21st Century Crisis

Benito J. Mariñas
Ivan Racheff Professor of Environmental Engineering
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Associcate Director For Water and Health
NSF Science and Technology Center WaterCAMPWS

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Urbana, Illinois

Beniscience and Techonology for Global Safe Water

The Millennium Development Goal Target of reducing by half the portion of people without sustainable access to safe water supply and effective sanitation by 2015 will not be achieved at the current rate of progress.  More than 800 million people will not have access to “improved” water supply, and 2.4 billion people will lack adequate sanitation.  Lack of access to “safe” water is a global challenge requiring the development of revolutionary technologies, and the creation of human resources capacity to scale-up and operate the technologies sustainably.  This challenge can be addressed with revolutionary advances in water quality technology and related fundamental science, and the development of sustainable, systems capable of producing affordable, robust and reliable supply of safe drinking water to impoverished people worldwide.  Such systems could integrate novel sensors that detect infective pathogens, robust treatment processes that destruct and/or remove these contaminants without producing toxic by-products.  These developments should be paralleled by building the capacity of human resources, developing microeconomic infrastructure, and facilitating acceptance by society.