Jordan: Water Scarcity: Difference between revisions

Why is water so important to us? Why is water so important? Firstly, it is one of the fundamental requirements for human physical survival along with oxygen, food, shelter and sleep. It is one of the basic human rights guaranteed by the United Nations. According to the UN Human Rights Council, ''"the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation is derived from the right to an adequate standard of living and inextricably related to the right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, as well as the right to life and human dignity".''<ref>Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights: The Right to Water and Sanitation Toolkit [online] [cit 1.11.2013] http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/ESCR/Pages/Water.aspx</ref> But it is not only a basic factor in the maintenance of our lives and the life of every organic lifeform on the planet, it is also essential to every other aspect of human life from cooking and cleaning, to transport and energy, to climate and food production, to carbon sequestration (the oceans act as a vital carbon sink and hence are becoming more and more acidified), to our religious rituals (think of the Catholic Church's use of holy water or the ablutions required of Islam before prayer), to our physical landscape (our coastlines, lakes, rivers, glacial valleys, etc) and to our mental landscape (our art, poetry and literature is full of water images, e.g. Stauss's The Blue Danube, Smetana's The Moldau, etc).