Letter from Stockholm

Inside the Stockholm City Conference Center where for the 10th annual Stockholm International Water Symposium is taking place, travel posters for the Swedish capital read "Beauty on the Water," reminding the some 800 participants inside of the spectacular backdrop offered by this nordic city by the sea– once the domain of Viking clans-- that is hosting World Water Week from August 13th to the 20th.

Indeed, this city-- a confluence of seaport and freshwater lakes connected by canals, crossed by bridges and bejeweled with fountains-- seems the perfect setting for this gathering of international water experts here to attend the formal sessions and informal meetings related to the International Symposium.

Those attending the various events have some awareness about the global water crisis that the mainstream media and the public seems largely oblivious to, a world in which

some five thousand children a day die because their drinking water is not safe,
where hundreds of millions of women spend hours each day carrying water to their families,
where as many as half the world's six billion people lack the basic sanitation systems that we in the industrial nations take for granted....
and where already over-allocated water resources now face further degradation from salination, human waste and industrial chemicals.

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