Water and Sanitation

Sean Gallagher describes his experiences shooting with a Canon 7D camera for his reporting project on China's Disappearing Wetlands.

Jennifer Redfearn's "Sun Come Up" is listed on The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' shortlist for Documentary Short Subjects.

Water issues affect us all, from the women who spend hours daily fetching water to political battles over international rivers to melting icepack and rising sea levels. We are all downstream.

Worldwide, just under 900 million people lack reliable access to safe water that is free from disease and industrial waste. And forty percent do not have access to adequate sanitation facilities. The result is one of the world's greatest public health crisis: 4,500 children die every day from waterborne diseases, more than from HIV-AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined.

On Wednesday October 6, experts and advocates discussed methods to improve water, sanitation and hygiene facilities and instruction for school children in the developing world.

Peter Sawyer said 4,500 children under the age of 14 die every day because of water-related diseases.

Sawyer was one of three speakers from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting who spoke about the worldwide water crisis from a journalistic perspective Thursday in Ballroom B of the Student Center.

Sawyer, a journalist for the center, said the role of the center's journalists is to tell the world about issues that are for the most part unknown.

"884 million people don't have access to clean drinking water," Sawyer said.

Four freelance journalists from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting shared their perspectives on the future of journalism in a speech Monday night.

The UN resolution declaring water as a human right is championed as a victory for water justice, but legal questions remain regarding the economics of water as a public trust.

Students attend the World Affairs Seminar to learn about water, and go home with a better sense of their world.

Molly Walton of Circle of Blue, an international network of journalists reporting on the global freshwater crisis, interviews Sean Gallagher on desertification in Inner Mongolia. Read excerpt below:

Sean Gallagher will speak about his reporting and multimedia work for China's Growing Sands in the Biodiversity Seminar at the Shanghai World Expo on May 31, 2010. The exposition will take place in the Belgium-EU Pavilion.

UN-Water, which works across UN entities to coordinate water and sanitation policy, released its first Global Annual Assessment of Sanitation and Drinking Water (GLAAS) on Wednesday in Washington, DC. 

The serious consequences of earth's changing climate are the subject of three new documentary films: "Easy Like Water," "Water Wars" and "Sun Come Up," which are funded in part by the Pulitzer Center.