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Abstract
In contemporary society, which is also defined as global risk society, the water crisis plays a controversial but decisive role in comparison with other kinds of risk (health care, environmental, financial, warlike). However, the sociological debate does not confer to the world water crisis the right significance: the essay precisely highlights this lack and focuses on the hypothesis that it could be also connected to the lack of interest that mass media agenda-setting shows to this issue. The result is that, in most cases, industrialized countries show an irresponsible approach towards a resource which is so precious for the simple fact that it is exhaustible. Furthermore, the advantages of both development and globalization are not equally distributed from a geographic point of view, and the gap between the ‘rich’ and the ‘poor’ is getting deeper and deeper also within this phenomenon. According to the author's perspective, it would be reasonable to talk about a water divide and assume a sustainable development capable of dealing with the overall problem of drinking water availability, its quality, its public access, with a view to democratic management and the sharing of this resource.
Notes
1. These forums are the largest events organized by the World Water Council. The forum in 2009 had a record participation of 30,000 delegates, including 3,000 organizers, about 20 heads of state or government, and 180 ministers of environment. The final day of the forum, 22 March, is World Water Day, an official day that reoccurs every year established in 1993 by the United Nations General Assembly. For more details see World Water Council, Water at a Crossroads. Dialogue and Debate at the 5th World Water Forum, Istanbul, August 2009, published by the World Water Council, Marseille.
2. The final text of the European Declaration for a New Water Culture was signed in Madrid on 18 February 2005: the Scientific Committee has been set up with 19 university water experts, whose role is to promote the debate about water resources (and more generally about the crisis of social and environmental unsustainability in the world) and to make dynamic the discussion of water scarcity in Europe and in the rest of the world.
3. Treating water as a purely economic item is a serious mistake because it implies that its various functions are considered as interchangeable values that can, therefore, be measured in monetary terms: however, the values linked to water are often complementary and, thus, cannot be replaced by money. We refer to: the fundamental values of existence, which are essential to dignify living conditions for each individual or community; the values of preserving the environment and the aquatic ecosystems; the values of intra- and intergenerational equity or the values of social cohesion that water distribution services bring. The value of these functions ought not to be administrated according to market rules since they cannot be measured from a monetary point of view.
4. A buffer zone is any vegetated area (hedges, woods, natural and artificial wetlands), positioned between terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. It is able to retain and reduce the amount of anthropic pollution to superficial and subterranean waters.
5. WHO and UNICEF (Citation2012), p. 31.
6. Through the program ‘Wash’ AMREF (African Medical and Research Foundation) counteracts the tragic difficulties of access to healthy water, experienced by African populations, developing several projects which provide communities with the necessary tools and knowledge to control the quality of water, as well as an increase in the available sources, thanks to the construction of wells.
7. Compare Human Development Report Citation2006, Beyond scarcity: Power, poverty and the global water crisis, published for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
8. Compare Asano, T., et al., Citation2007. Water reuse. Issues, technologies and applications. New York: McGraw-Hill, p. 39.
9. Compare United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) (Citation2011).
10. It is recommended to refer to climate change. The essay ‘One Planet, One Chance’ was produced by the photographers of Magnum Agency, who enriched traditional narrative by adding a new dimension made of photographic images, audio, video, graphs, and interactivity. This resource is available at: http://inmotion.magnumphotos.com/essay/one-planet-one-chance.
11. Even if in 1992 ONU instituted the ‘Worldwide Day of Water’ to awaken citizens and institutions to the importance of this precious resource, this aim has not been reached yet. Every year, for the last 20 years, the United Nations have asked the member states to carry out concrete initiatives on the themes concerning water resources and their waste: the subject of the 2012 of World Water Day is ‘water and alimentary security’.
12. In the second modernity one of the characteristics of new risks is their inevitability, a condition that we suffer regardless of our will and personal choices: this is because nobody can choose whether to accept them or decline them. It is the case of the forms of ecological risk (nuclear, chemical, genetic), that are developed to grow out of institutional control and that impose as ‘independent’, related only to the social environment.
13. Looked at from a global perspective, science changed from its past status as man's main instrument for achieving emancipation from tradition and religion, to become – together with technology – more powerful and complex. However, the two together now fail to foresee the consequences of their practice, and scientific thought is not able truly to demonstrate its rules of validation and verification. Compared to modernity, moreover, they are unsuccessful in sharing knowledge behavior with the larger community. Post-modern science is based on the efficiency of instrumental rationality, and social groups perceive it as a dogma, not unlike traditional religion. This science seems to configure itself as a perfectly functional mechanism, whose costs for humanity are unknown. Science and technology become a double-edged sword because to every advantage seems to correspond a ‘cost’ that the larger community ends up enduring in exchange for continuous satisfaction of new needs and opportunities.
14. The WSS principally aims to stimulate comparison and debate on themes with a high social impact, such as environment, security, demography, immigration, and poverty. The Summit gives voice to individuals with international reputations (Nobel Prize winners, scholars, politicians, businessmen, and representatives from national and international institutions).
15. In this case, the mistake was to focus on the individual rather than on the social context, giving the community the idea that the sexual choice, nationality, profession, habits, and membership of certain social categories were decisive factors of contagion. The media channels have propagated the concept of ‘risk categories’ which – in terms of prevention – is a serious obstacle because it makes you feel automatically ‘safe’ if you do not belong to them. The categories ‘labeled’ were: homosexuals, heroin addicts, Haitians, hemophiliacs, and hookers.
16. In Italy the specter of the total privatization of the country's water resources has been fended off thanks to the results of the referendum of 12–13 June 2011. The waste and the incorrect use of the resource reveal, however, the asymmetry between collective attitudes and behaviors.
17. The media agenda-setting theory developed by Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw states that elements prominent in the media agenda become prominent in the public mind (with the due differences related to the public, to the different power of the media agenda, and to the type of issues covered). The new directions of the research consider the agenda-setting as a dynamic and fluid phenomenon, strongly linked to the context. So the analysis moved gradually from the effects on the public to the agenda-building and to the relation with other agenda. Compare Protess and McCombs (Citation1991) and Bentivegna (Citation2003).
18. Moreover, the public recipient of information about risk is not a passive and homogeneous object, but rather an active interpreter that rejects, uses appropriately or improperly, and negotiates all information, even the most correct and detailed.
19. Risk analysis is composed of three separate but integrated elements, namely risk assessment, risk management, and risk communication. In particular, risk communication is considered as an interactive process of exchange of information and opinion on risk among risk assessors, risk managers, and other interested parties.
20. The Human Development Report (Citation2006) explains that the countries may also enact laws relating to water as a national property, but this resource overcomes political boundaries without any ‘passport’, passing in the form of rivers or lakes: the transboundary waters. The management of this interdependence is one of the major challenges of human development that the international community is facing.
21. Huesemann (Citation2003), p. 21–34.