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Argument: Dams supply water and help counter global water shortages

Issue Report: Hydroelectric dams

Supporting quotation

Michael McCarthy. “Water crisis is now ‘one of the greatest causes of mass suffering'”. The Independent. 22 March 2006 – Governments are losing the fight to tackle the world’s water crisis, now one of the greatest causes of mass suffering, a leading aid agency alleged yesterday.

The situation, which sees 1.1 billion people with no access to safe water and 2.6 billion people without basic sanitation, is steadily getting worse, in spite of a major pledge by the international community to improve it, according to the UK relief and development agency Tearfund.

The UN’s Millennium Development Goal (MDG) to “halve by 2015 the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation” is in danger of becoming no more than a pipe dream, the agency said in a report released for World Water Day, which falls today.