UN World Water Day 2021
What does water mean to you? Today – March 22 – is World Water Day. Since 1993, the global community has used this day to mobilize actions focused on raising the importance of freshwater.
This year’s theme is Valuing Water. For us, Water is Life. We’ve shared this value as a lab and as individuals since our launch in 2019. Whilst UN observances like this one are sometimes beyond the everyday reach, this year’s theme is a personal one, a call to action in the name of freshwater. How we value water is reflected in our everyday actions, the way we live, and the work we do.
Of all the water on the Earth’s surface, only about 1% is available as drinking water. Having access to abundant supplies of clean water is a privilege that not everyone gets, something we often forget.
For example, many First Nations communities here in Canada still do not have access to clean water despite local and federal promises to end all boil water advisories by March 2021. In some cases, children have lived their entire lives through to adulthood without ever being able to drink water from a tap.
This year, we’ve decided to extend our celebration into a week – World Water Week – to engage in discussions about freshwater and its value to us. We will be connecting with our global community of freshwater scientists and taking initiative locally. Our actions will be simple: collecting rubbish in local parks, meeting with our partners to discuss values, and re-centering our research to ensure it is aligned with those values.
Did you know that we’ve created stream ecology resources for local teachers and communities to use in high school programming? Find them here and here and we are grateful that in the past year, teachers and students from all over the Great Lakes basin have been accessing them as part of their own watershed explorations and learning.
