Rotary clubs help with water efforts
In less than a decade, the world’s water requirements will exceed today’s sustainable water supplies — by 40 percent.
Ten years after that, about 600 million children will live in areas of extremely high water stress, and by 2050, the number of people at risk from floods will increase from 1.2 billion to 1.6 billion, so say the World Meteorological Association, UNICEF, and the Intelligence Council.
Rotary International takes heed of water issues, whether it is too much water or too little, or it is contaminated.
Jessica Johnson is a member of the Mount Clemens Rotary Club.
“So much of our lives depend on access to clean water,” Johnson said. “From washing our hands, to cooking our daily meals, and relying on clean water for our sanitation purposes, clean water plays a huge part in our daily lives. Have you taken a moment to think about how much your life would be affected by not having this amenity?”
Rotarians want people to think about these issues on World Water Day, March 22.
Johnson devised a fun way for her fellow club members to choose a colorful tag from a display board last week to determine what donation they will make to The Rotary Foundation.
Any amount from $5 up from the club’s 52 active members supports Rotary International’s water projects for local, sustainable solutions that bring clean water, sanitation, and hygiene programs to more people.
Rotarians don’t just help with money. They stepped in when a toxic algae bloom took over in the Toledo area of Lake Erie in 2014. Restaurants closed, hospitals couldn’t function at full service, and bottled water was scarce.
Such algae blooms have happened throughout the world, causing deaths among kidney dialysis patients, poisoning of children and adults, and massive fish kills where people depend on fishing for food and livelihoods.
The Rotary Club of Toledo called on experts from the Ohio Farm Bureau and a biology professor to educate themselves. They became collaborators in a nonpolitical, nonpartisan way to create the Lake Erie Watershed Crisis Conference with 300 environmentalists, lawmakers and educators to devise solutions.
They came up with a plan to test water regularly and locate the source of problems, looking at sewage treatment plants and home septic tank systems that may be leaking, and farming practices. They used smartphones to conduct water quality tests and share data. Their aim was to find a solution that helped everyone. With only 34 members, they spent $20,000 on the project and created videos.
A result was that the U.S. and Canada adopted a goal to, by 2025, reduce phosphorus entering the lake by 40 percent. According to an article in “Rotarian” magazine, “Michigan declared its portion of Lake Erie impaired. Because of the Clean Water Act, it gives the state the ability to set limits on phosphorus.”
Eleven Rotary clubs are within a 25-mile radius of Flint. When the Flint Water Crisis came to light, fire stations and churches became places families could go for water and water filters. Donations of bottled water poured into the area
The former president of the Flint club, Amy Krug, turned her club’s attention to the long-term impact of the Flint children being exposed to lead. More than 8,000 children were younger than six-yearsold when exposed, some through nursing mothers who drank the water.
There is no safe blood lead level in children, and lead can affect both physical and developmental processes.
Rotarians contributed to the Flint Charitable Foundation for water-related efforts in the greater Flint area and to the Flint Child Health & Development Fund, The Red Cross, and to food banks.
The Rotary Foundation is used in many and varied ways.
Rotary International’s Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Rotary Action Group, called WASH, goes beyond water access issues and includes hygiene, sanitation and toilets in a world where 673 million people still practice open defecation.
WASH also offers these statistics: 579 million people do not have access to an improved drinking water source; 1.4 billion people lack an improved sanitation facility, and more than 1,000 children under age five die daily from diarrheal diseases that are preventable with improved water, sanitation and hygiene.
The E-Club of WASH was holding online meetings long before COVID-19 forced people to physically distance, bringing together people from many countries with extensive expertise in water issues.
A World WASH Summit showed a Rotary project in Haiti, and a panel on sanitation and hygiene in the era of COVID-19. At least two million Americans have no clean water or sanitation including many Navajo families in three western U.S. states. Small former mining towns in West Virginia, and towns in other states, have gone without safe drinking and bathing water for decades.
For many years, members of the Warren Rotary Club made service trips to Bonao in the Dominican Republic to establish water filtration stations in remote villages there by providing BioSand filters that cost about $50 each and serve the whole community.
In India, a Rotarian learned that the reason teenage girls dropped out of school was because there were no toilets for them to use, and started projects to correct the problem which had a direct effect on the education of local children.
Since 2009, the Rotary Club of Newmarket in Uganda has supported the Ongutoi Health Centre with a water collection system. In Australia, a Rotarian is working with people to clean the rivers in their communities. Rotary members also worked with fishermen to build an artificial reef that helped save the fishing industry in the Philippines. Residents of a community in Nigeria can now use water from a solar-powered borehole supply system.
WASH sponsors a competition for the best water-related project with $1,700 in prize money.