March 21 "Environment and Education" research laboratory at USPU initiated and conducted "Management and conservation of water resources" seminar-business game as part of World Water Day with the participation of teachers of chemistry, ecology and methods of teaching and the second year students of Nature and Geography Department.
The purpose of the workshop was to draw attention of the participants to the current problems of water resources and the need to preserve the purity of water bodies. The tasks of the workshop included discussing the important environmental problems of water resources of the planet in a business game, reinforcing the need for environmental actions to preserve the purity of water resources.
At the seminar the students were performing various roles: a representative of legislature, a health officer, an agronomist, a biologist, a geographer, a chemistry scientist, an ecologist, a social psychologist, a representative of public utilities, industry representatives and so on. Each performance was quite convincing with utilizing the innovative methods and information technologies, demonstrating the materials related to the conservation of water resources and raising awareness of the need for water resources conservation.
Additional information:
March 22, 1993 was proclaimed the World Water Day by the UN General Assembly. In 2003 the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed the period 2005-2015 as the "Water for Life" International Decade for Action.
The main objectives of the World Water Day are the following: promoting the appropriate measures to address the problem of providing the population with fresh water, public awareness of the need to protect and preserve fresh water resources and water resources in general, involvement of the Ministry, international agencies, NGOs and the private businesses into the World Water Day.
The World Water Day reminds all residents of the planet of the value and importance of water and the continuation of life on the Earth. It is not a day of joy, it is the day of concern ... Because each individual can use only about 1 % of water resources of our planet, a significant portion of which becomes more and more exhausted and polluted every year!
The problems of water equally concern the poor and the wealthy countries; it is the first call, a reminder of the need to protect the nature as a source of water. By definition of UNECE, Ukraine is the country with a lot of water supply problems. The consumption of water in Ukraine in the years of middle amount of water available for one person is 1.09 thousand m3, and in the dry years- 0.62 thousand m3 of water, in the countries of low water supply the water resources available for one person do not exceed 1.5 thousand m3 per year.
65% of Ukrainians have the centralized water supply, 83 % of those live in urban areas and 26 % in rural areas (according to the report COWI, 2002). Nearly 11 million citizens of Ukraine use the water from wells. According to official data, 1.8 million of wells are contaminated. More than 800,000 people in 13 regions use imported water of poor quality.
