The Arab Water Council has held a seminar, under the title “Rationalising drinking water – sustainable water treatment – (2022: the groundwater year)”.
The seminar was organized under the auspices of HomePure Nova, on the occasion of the World Water Day and the Arab Water Day.
Experts in water, environmental awareness, and health affairs in Egypt and the Arab World, attended the seminar, including former ministers of irrigation and water resources Mahmoud Abu Zeid and Hussein El-Eteify, and Ambassador Gamal Gaballah, the head of the Housing and Water Resources Department at the Arab League.
The participants stressed in the seminar the importance of developing the environmental and health awareness and the necessity of rationalizing water consumption and the purification of drinking water using HomePure Water filtration system. The participants pinpointed that providing clean water is a genuine right to all human beings.
Abu Zeid, who is also the Honorary President of the World Water Council, said: “We need to work on reducing water pollution using the latest scientific methods.” He highlighted that persevering human health is the main factor in sustainable development.
He also pointed out that the excessive use of water is one of the biggest problems facing the government, in addition to regional disputes with upstream countries. Given the problems of climate change and global warming, it has become difficult to predict the amount of the remaining water supplies; therefore, the problem of water scarcity must be addressed quickly.
Hussein Al-Aetify stressed that groundwater is of pivotal importance in achieving the objectives of the 2030 Sustainable Development Plan (the 2030 Agenda) in the Arab region, as most Arab countries depend on groundwater. Unfortunately, most countries in the region extract groundwater at unsustainable rates exceeding the natural ground recharge rates.
He said: “Water pollution is an explicit and direct threat to life on earth. In many agricultural areas, the leakage of fertilizers into aquifers and contamination of water supplies are all forms of pollution that must be combated and criminalized with the most severe penalties.”
Concluding the discussion, the participants recommended the necessity of developing policies regularizing the management and rationalization of water use, while emphasizing quality of the water and preserving it from pollution. Recommendations also included the need to activate and activate water treatment and reuse systems (non-conventional water resources) to make up for the regional water deficit.
