More than 2 billion people around the world live without access to safe drinkable water, as rivers, groundwater, lakes and glaciers face continued threats of pollution and overexploitation due to urbanization, environmental destruction, and climate change. This World Water Day, Mongabay looks back at some of its coverage from 2024 on how local communities are trying to protect the world’s dwindling water resources. Protecting the Amazon’s headwaters Mongabay’s short documentary The Time of Water, directed by Pablo Albarenga, follows Indigenous leaders Uyunkar Domingo Peas Nampichkai of the Achuar people from Ecuador and Wrays Pérez Ramírez of the Wampís Nation from Peru as they travel along the tributaries of the Marañón, the main source of the Amazon River. During their journey, they stop at villages to talk to communities, especially the younger generation, about protecting the Amazon Basin from threats posed by mining, logging, and the fossil fuel industry. “We don’t live without water. That’s why we have to make a great alliance to recover the rivers, the jungle,” Pérez Ramírez says. “Not to extract gold, as the non-Indigenous man wants. Gold is not eaten … Time is now, and we must act fast, because time is not gold. Time is water.” Restoring a Kenyan riverbank In Kenya, decades of intense agriculture have stripped the trees in Tana River’s catchment area, resulting in soil washing into the river. This has led to a decline in both water quality and farmland productivity, Mongabay’s Ochieng’ Ogodo reported in October. Ogodo tells the story…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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