|
Learning
Center Categories:
Water
And Health
Learn
About Water Quality
Water
Can Heal!
Contaminants
Fact Sheets
Top
Water News
Did
you know?
Reverse osmosis is the finest water filtration method known. This process will
allow the removal of particles as small as ions from a solution. It is used
to purify water and remove salts and other impurities in order to improve the
color, taste or properties of the fluid. R.O. uses a membrane that is semi-permeable,
allowing the fluid that is being purified to pass through it, while rejecting
other ions and contaminants from passing.
This technology uses a process
known as crossflow to allow the r.o. membrane to continually clean itself. This
is the reason of why an r.o. element can last many years before clogging or
need replacement. This
water purification process requires a driving force to push the fluid through
the membrane, and the most common force is household water pressure or pressure
from a booster pump. The higher the pressure, the larger the driving force and
efficiency.
|
Whose
water is it anyway? Negotiation of Water Rights.
Water
is essential for life and livelihoods. As demands for water increase -
for drinking, domestic use, irrigation, industry, and environmental conservation
- areas that were once water-abundant are increasingly challenged by conflicting
claims and the need to better allocate water resource Worldwide, water
use more than quadrupled during the 20th century.
As
resources become scarcer, contesting claims usually drive attempts to
determine more clearly who has rights to use the resource. In contrast
to conventional approaches focusing on water rights as defined only by
government laws, Negotiating Water Rights highlights the importance of
understanding "legal pluralism," the diversity and dynamism of local customs,
institutions, and practices that actually regulate access to water in
fields, villages, and cities.
If government laws and agencies can create suitable conditions by respecting
local institutions, providing technical advice, and helping enforce agreements,
then users can draw on their local knowledge to cooperatively forge better
ways to allocate scarce water, whether within a single irrigation system
or within a larger river basin. Irrigation has been a major contributor
to the increase in food production that changed countries like Bangladesh
and India from famine-prone regions to food-surplus regions.
Beyond
just producing crops, irrigation systems in developing countries are vital
to rural livelihoods, providing water for livestock and fish production,
domestic use, and many small enterprises. Although irrigation now has
the lion's share of freshwater use, demand for urban and industrial water
supplies is growing rapidly around the world. Simply taking water away
from agriculture-expropriation without compensation-is inequitable and
likely to face increasing resistance.
The
much higher economic value of water for urban and industrial use creates
the possibility of win-win agreements with farmers willing to transfer
their water to other uses, but only if forums are available for negotiating
mutually beneficial agreements. Water is a great force for bringing people
together. It is a classic common pool resource, where one person's use
affects another person, but when people work together they can accomplish
a great deal.
This
work, which received funding from the Ford Foundation, shows how users
can participate in creating better ways to allocate access to this vital
resource. Perhaps the best way to gauge how future water shortages produce
the legal battles necessary to resolve such sensitive issues is to examine
where such shortages and water rights negotiating has occurred. Case studies
from around the world (Nepal, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan,
Indonesia, Burkina Faso, Spain and New Mexico, USA) show the range of
ways in which people can come together to defend their water rights and
how negotiation processes can help adapt to changing situations:
Nepal
hill irrigation systems have rich traditions of water rights. A case study
there shows that when disputes arise, farmers use varied strategies, including
court cases, international aid projects, political patronage, and even
sabotage and violence, to establish or defend their claims, but the most
favorable outcomes arise when community leaders establish good relationships
with each other. As the future produces water shortages, the negotiation
of water rights will continue to be a dramatic and unavoidable event all
over the world. How this crisis is managed will determine the health and
success of large regions.
Healthy and Convenient!
Our Featured Reverse Osmosis Drinking Water System
|
=
Products of Superior Performance and Dependability 
