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Running Pure - Protecting Forests Can Provide Cities with Cleaner, Cheaper Water
An Alliance study shows that protecting forest areas can provide a cost-effective means of supplying many of the world’s biggest cities with high quality drinking water, providing significant health and economic benefits to urban populations.
The new report – Running Pure – shows that more than a third of the world’s 105 biggest cities – including New York, Jakarta, Tokyo, Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, Los Angeles, Barcelona, Nairobi, and Melbourne – rely on fully or partly protected forests in catchment areas for much of their drinking water. Well-managed natural forests minimize the risk of landslides, erosion’ and sedimentation. They substantially improve water purity by filtering pollutants, such as pesticides, and in some cases capture and store water.
According to the report, adopting a forest protection strategy can result in massive savings. It is, for example, much cheaper to protect forests than to build water treatment plants. In New York, the adoption of such a strategy will be seven times cheaper than building and operating a treatment plant.
Today, water-related diseases kill millions of people each year, and in urban areas with inadequate freshwater supply, poor sanitation, and bad hygiene practices, the infant mortality rate is 10-20 times the norm. With around half of the world’s population currently living in towns and cities, these problems are likely to increase in the future as populations and cities continue to grow rapidly.
To view the report click on the link in the box.
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