1 billion people at risk from dirty water: environmental expert

A group of environmentalists are calling for an international effort to reduce pollution in the world's waterways or people could have difficulty finding fresh water in the next five years.

About a dozen experts who are members of Waterkeeper Alliance, a nonprofit organization which has been at the forefront of trying to clean up the world's seas, rivers and lakes for 20 years, gathered in Manhattan on March 22. They heard from Robert F. Kennedy Jr, an environmental lawyer and president of the organization, about the threat of global water pollution.

"[The situation] is dire now,'' Kennedy told China Daily. "There are close to a billion people whose lives are marginalized so deeply that they are at a point of survival on a day to day basis and the root cause for almost all of them is a lack of clean water and fresh water. Only one out of nine people on Earth has access to good clean water supplies and clean water. For the rest of the world, water is a precious commodity."

He added: "Dye houses, energy and mineral extractions and factory farms are the major polluters…We need to transition to clean energy.''

Hao Xin, an environmentalist in China and a member of Waterkeeper Alliance's council also attended the meeting. He has waged a 10-year campaign to clean up the Qiantang river in Zheijang province.

"Ten years ago, the Qiantang river had many problems like industrial pollution, agricultural pollution, and people at that time treated the river more or less like a place to dump waste water," Hao told China Daily.

He said that he and his professors at a university where he was a student created a non-profit organization called Green Zheijang to identify pollutants and report them to environmental protection bureaus which staged a clean-up. He then urged local people to report pollution that they saw to an interactive online map he had created.

"They lost a good environment, they lost their property, fisherman lost fish because of pollution, so they definitely reported it,"

Waterkeeper Alliance has a network of 300 organizations that patrol 2.5 million square miles of rivers, lakes and coastal waterways on six continents from America to Asia, the Caribbean to Africa and beyond.

The organization's work comes as the United Nations warns that 4 billion people, representing nearly two-thirds of the world population, experience severe water scarcity during at least one month of the year, and just 1 percent of the earth's freshwater is accessible to people, despite demand expected to rise by one-third by 2050.