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Our contribution to the natural water cycle

Crew+ Champions Journal: Victor Pineda

By IW:LEARN

March 25^th, 2024

Humanity's survival heavily depends on the world's natural capacity to provide daily access to clean and safe water. Even though only 3% of the earth's water reserves are freshwater, suitable for human consumption, nature's ecological processes ensure its continuous and sustainable availability, which is crucial for preserving life on our planet. Yet, what steps are we taking to ensure that nature can continue to provide us and our future generations with the resources we need? Are we actively guaranteeing the availability of this precious resource in the future? And what can individuals do to make a difference before it is too late?

Worldwide, most of us are unaware of the pollution we generate and its impacts on our health and the availability of water in the near future. We must be more mindful of reusing water resources, such as rainwater, and optimizing water use to prevent excessive waste. Unfortunately, we often waste excessive amounts of water when we can optimize its use. We throw away solid waste, plastics, and chemical substances in water bodies, from disinfectants to extremely dangerous pesticides, and we forget that everything is a cycle that comes back to us again.

So far, our impact on nature has primarily involved contaminating thousands of cubic meters of pristine water supplied by nature and returning it into waterways with severely degraded quality, threatening life and diminishing biodiversity. Elders yearn to see bodies of water restored to the natural conditions over 50 years ago. But the pressing question remains: what can we do to rectify the damage we have inflicted on nature, particularly concerning our water resources?

Our contribution to the natural water cycle

Education and awareness at all levels, as well as in each household, can minimize the damage to water bodies; small changes, can have a significant impact. Measures such as saving the water we use, by not letting taps run when we don’t use water, taking short showers instead of baths, collecting rainwater to reuse it when watering the lawn, correctly disposing of waste such as oils, chemical solvents, solid waste, as well as minimizing the use of chemicals for cleaning homes, help make water treatment much easier and more effective, with a positive effect on the environment. Let's start with each home and workplace because the repercussions affect all of us; our contribution is, health, nature, and to sustain life resources for all.

In Honduras, the GEF CREW+ and other projects, with the support of authorities and the Secretary of Natural Resources and Environment of Honduras SERNA, take small steps to improve the quality of our water bodies. The GEF CReW+ project in the country supports wastewater treatment systems in cities that lack them, such as Omoa and La Mosquitia, aiding communities in making treatment systems sustainable and managing solid waste properly. Furthermore, it contributes to policy regulation improvements and implementation to minimize the contamination of marine-coastal spaces and generate cartographic information that identifies environmentally sensitive areas in marine zones and spaces.

The task is big, but if each one contributes to the natural water cycle, little by little, we will generate more life through water because water is life.

About the project

The GEF CReW+ Project "An integrated approach to water and wastewater management using innovative solutions and promoting financing mechanisms in the Wider Caribbean Region" is a partnership project funded by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) that is being co-implemented by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 18 countries of the Wider Caribbean Region (WCR).

This project builds upon its previous successful phase “The Caribbean Regional Fund for Wastewater Management (CReW)” project (2011-2017). GEF CReW+ is being executed by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH, the Organisation of the American States (OAS), and the Secretariat of the Cartagena Convention (CAR/RCU) on behalf of the IDB and UNEP respectively.