We are gearing up here for our NanoWater 2004 conference on September 27th, which were holding in Amsterdam as part of the large water industry trade show, Aquatech.
We were recently able to secure the participation of Professor Raphael Semiat, who heads the GWRI Rabin Desalination Laboratory, at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology onto the program.
Among the long list of contributions Professor Semiat has made to the development of desalination technologies and water purification, we were struck by some recent comments he made in the industry publication, American Water Works Association.
Among them were the following:
“Twenty five percent of the world’s population do not have adequate water. About 10,000 to 60,000 people die every day and about 2 million children die every year because of diseases caused by bad water,” Semiat said.
“We can treat different types of water, including sewage water and industrial water. In many cases we can afford it, and in many cases there have been no harmful environmental results.”
Questions remain, though, concerning the future supply of water for consumption and agriculture and finding alternative energy sources to solve environmental pollution problems, he said.
“The future of mankind depends on finding solutions to these questions, in addition to the quest for peace,” Semiat said.
We are pleased to have Prof. Semiat join the speaker faculty of NanoWater 2004 and look forward to having him discuss with our other speakers what those solutions might be, especially as they are enabled by nanotechnology.
An article in New Scientist today highlights the seriousness of the issue where in Stockholm “The world’s leading water scientists warned this week that this little-heralded crisis is repeating itself across Asia, and could cause widespread famines in the decades to come.”