Water and Sanitation

In Dhaka, Banglafesh's capitol on track to become one of the world's biggest cities, hundreds of thousands of people fill in the urban fabric each year. Most end up in the slum communities -- crowded shantytowns without water or sanitation facilities. Often these are government lands usurped by "influential people," mafiosi-like business and political elite who then rent them out to newcomers.

After his home slipped into the powerful currents of the Meghna River four years ago, Monoranjab Dus came looking for new land along this waterlogged stretch of coastline slowly emerging from the sea.

Last November Foreign Exchange aired a special edition, focusing on the nearly 1 billion people around the world who lack access to clean water and sanitation. The host, Daljit Dhaliwal, highlighted Pulitzer Center's work on water issues in east Africa and how those reports were then used to frame an interactive web portal to engage the public, and in particular students and educators, throughout the world.

Nepal is awash with water during the wet season. But for most of the year life in Kathmandu-- a city already choked by smog, and growing more polluted with the influx of rural Nepalis each year-- is strained by the circumstances of an ageing and inadequate water distribution network hobbled by political instability. Photos of life in the Himalaya's dirtiest city.

Zeeshan Khan, a 17-year-old engineering student, says he knows who Pakistanis blame for what has become the largest migration in their country's history. "These people are coming due to the bombing," he said, gesturing to the thousands of refugees milling around the Mardan refugee camp. "Due to the jet artillery, the F-16s, the heavy weapons. All our houses are destroyed."

I returned from my six weeks of travel with about 2,500 images; I have never been a prolific shooter, probably because I started out shooting slide film and knowing the cost of each frame. Throughout my trip, I made a point of downloading and categorizing my images as I made them. To keep all the files in order, I created folders for each location I visited with RAW and JPEG sub-folders.

Thursday, at the World Climate Conference in Geneva, Bangladesh's prime minister called for assistance from the international community to help the country adapt to the impacts of climate change, which, she said, could necessitate the relocation of 20 million Bangladeshis by 2050.

Climate change is melting the glaciers of the world's highest mountains, affecting millions downstream.

See video as it originally ran at Time.

As the world looks towards the December summit in Copenhagen, the Nepali government, World Bank, Asian Development Bank, DFID and Danish Embassy are arranging their own pre-Copenhagen negotiations for Himalayan nations. On August 31st and September 1st, representatives from the Himalayan region are scheduled to meet in Katmandu to debate and strengthen South Asian positions before the meeting in Copenhagen.

We've talked to Nepali experts on climate change and it's impact on South Asia:

India is making moves to protect its natural resources, instituting an environmental agency modeled after the US' own EPA, according to the Financial Times.

Sean Gallagher joined a panel discussion with China Radio International on Thursday, July 30th, to speak about desertification in China. The discussion ran for an hour, from 10:00-11:00 a.m. Beijing time (10:00-11:00 p.m. EDT).

William Wheeler wrote about the potential water conflict brewing between India and Pakistan. Here, in another dispatch, he looks at the question of Kashmir in growing tensions over a limited resource.