World Water Day celebrated by U.N., few others
In case you haven’t heard — and you haven’t — today is World Water Day, an annual holiday aimed at drawing attention to alarming stats about global water needs, encouraging world leaders to take action, and otherwise passing by unnoticed. But today isn’t just any old World Water Day; it’s also the kick-off for the United Nations-backed International Decade for Water, during which the organization will focus on fulfilling its Millennium Goals, which include aiding the estimated 2.4 billion people worldwide who have no access to sanitary sewage systems and the 1.1 billion who lack safe drinking water — numbers the U.N. hopes to cut in half by 2015. Although the goals were set out in 2000, little has been done thus far to achieve them. They were just waiting for the right holiday.
