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Articles by Daniel Moss

Daniel Moss is co-coordinator of Our Water Commons and currently lives in Oaxaca, Mexico with his family. He served on the media team for the Peoples' Water Forum held in Istanbul in March, 2009.

Featured Article

On July 28, after years of grassroots pressure, the United Nations’ General Assembly will consider and debate a resolution supporting the right to “safe and clean drinking water and sanitation”.

Maude Barlow, former Senior Advisor on Water to the President of the United Nations General Assembly described the denial of access to clean water as the “most violated human right”. It’s worth recalling some alarming statistics:

1.2 billion people have no access to safe drinking water and 2.6 billion without access to proper sanitation. Every 8 seconds a child dies from preventable water-borne disease. Women and girls are disproportionately affected by the lack of water and sanitation.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights did not explicitly recognize the human right to water and sanitation, allowing member states to reject the existence of these fundamental rights. Climate change has already increased water scarcity and contamination.

Sadly, many states, most notably the U.S., Canada, Australia and England, oppose a resolution establishing the right to water and sanitation. Divisions between the North and South are gro... Read more

All Articles

  • How Dirty Are We Willing to Get?

    At the alternative climate summit currently underway in Cochabamba, Bolivia, criticism is sharp and unrelenting about false climate change solutions. Rightly so. Most of the solutions proposed through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) process are based on poor science, lucrative carbon markets and only measly changes in the production and consumption […]

  • A water commons clash in the coliseum

    The battle to preserve water as a common good takes to the Roman streets this weekend. As you turn on the tap to hydrate yourself today, please take a moment to think of our Italian colleagues fighting to overturn the water-privatizing Ronchi law.

  • A water perspective on Copenhagen and beyond

    How does improved water stewardship fit into cooling our planet? How well were the water-climate connections made at the recent Copenhagen climate deliberations? If you’re like me, you only have a lay person’s understanding of ecology — and global politics for that matter. But I do know that the CO2 reduction and carbon sequestration strategies […]

  • Money’s coming to cool the planet: What’s the winning spending plan?

    With their natural resources pilfered, have Native American gambling casinos been payback, a further pillage (described as Tonto’s revenge during the Abramoff scandal) or perhaps both? It’s a relevant debate for today’s global warming talks. During these next weeks of climate change deliberations in Copenhagen, environmental service payment programs will be hammered out. What’s the […]