Photo: Geoff Oliver Bugbee for Mercy Corps

A few months ago, I wrote about a team of journalists reporting on water issues and conflict in Kenya and Ethiopia, where a tremendous drought is spreading across the region. Pastoralists — herders whose livelihoods depend on the animals they breed and tend — are running out of water and pasture land. As a result, they are crossing borders and traditional tribal boundaries in pursuit of water. This search for scarce resources is leading to tensions, as The East African Standard reports from Nairobi:

"There is already a build-up of inter and intra clan tensions over water and pasture," says the DO [District Officer]. In fact, he says, they have had to quell inter clan clashes at Sake, with the assistance of elders. Those far away from the Ethiopian border have been left at the mercy of nature, the Government and development agencies, to provide water.

In Ethiopia, the reporting team created a film that compellingly illustrates the oncoming crisis. “Pastoralists are more vulnerable to drought than they were 40 years ago," the film tells us. "Researchers predict that they will be some of the first people on Earth forced to abandon their way of life due to climate change.”

This isn't an adult tricycle, it's an innovative way to reduce the number of people — estimated at 1.1 billion — who lack access to clean drinking water.

The Aquaduct is essentially a bicycle that can transport and filter up to 20 gallons of water at a time.

It's simple to use: Just ride to your local water source and pour water into the rear holding tank. As you ride home, the pedaling forces the water through a filtration system and into a smaller holding tank in the front. You can also filter the water by pedaling in place.

Watch the video to see how it all works.

Photo: Steve Bailey (flickr)

My attention has recently been drawn to the increasing opposition students, consumers and activists are having to bottled water. A US-based group called Think Outside the Bottle is beginning an advocacy campaign to bring awareness to some of the more dire consequences of our thirst for bottled water, and even government agencies are beginning to act to reduce their consumption.

“City and state governments are looking at the economics of banning bottled water. Citing environmental concerns and a misallocation of resources, Los Angeles; San Francisco; Ann Arbor, Mich.; and the state of Illinois have banned the use of public funds to purchase bottled water for city and state functions…In June, the US Conference of Mayors adopted a resolution to bring attention to the negative impact of bottled water and promote local sources."

The director of a consumer rights group called Food and Water Watch has noticed that people of all types are showing increased awareness about issues involved with bottled water, according to the Christian Science Monitor. "I overhear small children in the grocery store telling their mothers not to buy it."

The negative impacts of bottled water are undeniable, but as a fact sheet the Monitor put out for World Water Day illustrates, the politics of water internationally are extremely complicated. In many parts of the world, bottled water is the only sanitary way to access the resource, and at the moment there is no alternative. The lesson? In places where the water is drinkable, drink it!

Photo: Andrew Heavens (flickr)

One of the more critical and less talked about environmental changes occurring right now in several regions of the world, is a developing shortage of water. The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting has partnered with the Common Language Project to send journalists into East Africa in order to report on this growing crisis: According to the Pulitzer Center, "Water scarcity in East Africa is fueling conflict and thwarting development while growing in step with local populations and rising global temperatures."

The blog postings by these journalists, as they learn more about the politics of water in Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda, are worth reading, watching and listening to.

Youyouyouyouyou! Shout tiny little kids at our beat-up land rover as it races down the arrow-straight road from Yabello, slowing occasionally for dust devils and herds of annoyed camels.

We’re on our way to Dillo, to report on some of the most extreme water scarcity problems in the country. I’m trying to focus on my notes, all of the interviews and statistics I’ll need to contextualize the interviews we have set up and the long-distance water walk we’ll be participating in the following morning.

Problem is there are too many distractions.

Today the BBC posted a video that took a closer look inside Kibera, a large urban slum of Nairobi. Kibera is experiencing a water and sanitation crisis as nearly one million people are living in the slum without a suitable water supply.

The Economist recently took a look at how the process of recycling is helping to sustain one community in India. The dalits, a lower caste of Hindu, are participating in an economy that not only provides them with income, but helps to reuse some of India's waste.

Disposable plastic cups are many times reborn in Dharavi. In a spiralling continuum, they are discarded and gathered in, melted down to their polypropylene essence, and re-moulded in some new plastic form. Recycling is one of the slum's biggest industries. Thousands of tonnes of scrap plastic, metals, paper, cotton, soap and glass revolve through Dharavi each day.