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While many Americans are worrying about not gaining weight during the holiday season, one-sixth of our planet's population is in danger of malnutrition, not obesity. As the U.N. World Food Program recently reported, more than a billion people do not get enough food to be healthy. Even more alarmingly, as U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has declared, some six million children die of hunger every year. Even here in the United States, in the midst of the recession, almost 50 million Americans are having a hard time feeding themselves and their children.

A half-century ago, when similar problems loomed, the Green Revolution -- and the worldwide network of research agencies that grew out of it -- created new higher-yielding, disease-resistant food crops for the areas of the world that most needed them.

But today, rather than uniting in a global effort to end hunger, we're settling into the same old "I'm right, you're wrong" camps. Environmentalists see only the negatives from the first Green Revolution: heavy use of environmentally unfriendly pesticides and fertilizers, and fewer options for small farmers in poor countries. Agriculture advocates point out that hunger and starvation would be even more widespread today without the advances from the 1960s and '70s and call for more of the same.

As with most other controversial issues, the debate is not so much about the final goal but about how to get there. Global food issues, however, are so urgent that we cannot afford the luxury of lengthy ideological arguments. With so much starvation and an ever increasing world population, we simply need more nutritious food, especially in developing countries, plus a viable distribution network. At the same time, the amount of land devoted to agriculture worldwide is decreasing for a variety of reasons, and climate changes could create droughts or floods in some now-arable land.

The answer, it seems obvious, is to produce more and better food from the available land, or in economic terminology, to increase agricultural productivity. One of the keys to solving the hunger problem over the last 40 years has been agricultural productivity growth, or the rate at which productivity increases each year. It has slowed dramatically from the glory days of the mid-20th century. Innovation and research back then enabled farmers around the world to grow enough food for an expanding population. Much of that research was funded by the U.S. government as well as other nations, NGOs and private foundations, and history shows that such investments do pay off in new crops and higher productivity.

Since then, in the U.S. and other developed-world countries, the burden for funding agricultural research has largely shifted to the private, for-profit sector. While such funded research can make important discoveries, those discoveries tend not to be shared with others, for competitive or profit-based reasons. That's understandable, but unfortunate for the parts of the world that have unique or persistent problems feeding their citizens and that can't afford to conduct their own research.

Economists who study food issues say the worldwide drop in productivity is a red flag: potential shortages of soybeans, rice, wheat and maize, the world's primary grains, are a real possibility. Add in ballooning populations in poor countries, and you have the potential for a global disaster.

Philanthropists are making positive change. At the recent World Food Prize symposium, for example, Microsoft founder Bill Gates spoke eloquently about making small-holder farming more productive and profitable, and about finding ways to make the next Green Revolution truly sustainable and environmentally sound. He and his wife, Melinda, have made agricultural development a key initiative in their Gates Foundation, which is funding hundreds of innovative new ideas. The work of the Gates Foundation and other philanthropists can help make progress, but as a nation, we also must contribute for this greater global good.

Federal investment in agricultural research for the 21st century is critical. Research funding must be targeted specifically for food productivity research, and it must also take into account environmental concerns about the use of pesticides and fertilizers as well as how water supplies can most wisely be used. And the investment must come soon; new agricultural innovations can take years, even decades, to be widely adopted.

If, for once, Americans can avoid the usual bickering and personal attacks, we won't be too late.

Allen S. Levine is dean of the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences and Director of the Minnesota Obesity Center at the University of Minnesota. J. Brian Atwood is dean of the Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota and a former Administrator of USAID. The views the authors express are their own and do not reflect an official position of the University of Minnesota.

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World Hunger Requires Research, Not Rancor

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While many Americans are worrying about not gaining weight during the holiday season, one-sixth of our planet's population is in danger of malnutrition, not obesity. As the U.N. World Food Program recently reported, more than a billion people do not get enough food to be healthy. Even more alarmingly, as U.N.

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This fact sheet is divided into the following sections:

Hunger is a term which has three meanings (Oxford English Dictionary 1971)

the uneasy or painful sensation caused by want of food; craving appetite. Also the exhausted condition caused by want of food

the want or scarcity of food in a country

a strong desire or craving

World hunger refers to the second definition, aggregated to the world level. The related technical term (in this case operationalized in medicine) is either malnutrition, or, if malnutrition is taken to refer to both undernutrition and overnutrition (obesity, overweight) as it increasingly is, undernutrition. Both malnutrition and undernutrition refer to the effects on people of not having enough food.

There are two basic types of malnutrition/undernutrition. The first and most important is protein-energy malnutrition (PEM). It is basically a lack of calories and protein. Food is converted into energy by humans, and the energy contained in food is measured by calories. Protein is necessary for key body functions including provision of essential amino acids and development and maintenance of muscles. Protein-energy malnutriton is the more lethal form of malnutrition/hunger and is the type of malnutrition that is referred to when world hunger is discussed. This leads to growth failure. Principal types of growth failure are:

The two types of acute malnutrition are wasting (also called marasmus) or nutritional edema, (also called kwashiorkor). Wasting is characterised by rapid weight loss and in its severe form can lead to death. Nutritional edema is caused by insufficient protein in the diet. See visual illustrations here.

Stunting is a slow, cumulative process and is caused by insufficient intake of some nutrients. It is estimated by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) to affect 161 million children world wide (UNICEF Nutrition). Stunted children may have normal body proportions but look younger than their actual age. Stunting develops over a long period as a result of inadequate nutrition or repeated infections, or both.

The second type of malnutrition, also very important, is micronutrient (vitamin and mineral) deficiency. This is not the type of malnutrition that is referred to when world hunger is discussed, though it is certainly very important. Specific examples of micronutrient deficiency such as Vitamin A are discussed below. (For more examples see UNICEF Nutrition in Emergencies Lesson 2.1 p 11 and for a good overview of malnutriton topics see all of Lesson 2.)
Take a two-question hunger quiz on this section
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that about 795 million people of the 7.3 billion people in the world, or one in nine, were suffering from chronic undernourishment in 2014-2016. Almost all the hungry people, 780 million, live in developing countries, representing 12.9 percent, or one in eight, of the population of developing counties. There are 11 million people undernourished in developed countries (FAO 2015; for individual country estimates, see Annex 1. For other valuable sources, especially if interested in particular countries or regions, see IFPRI 2016 and Rosen et. al. 2016).

Undernourishment around the world, 1990-2 to 2012-4

Number of undernourished and prevalence (%) of undernourishment

Source: FAO The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2015 p. 8
Take a three-question hunger quiz on this section.
The vast majority of hungry people live in developing regions, which saw a 42 percent reduction in the prevalence of undernourished people between 1990-92 and 2012-14. Despite this progress, about one in eight people, or 13.5 percent of the overall population, remain chronically undernourished in these regions, down from 23.4 percent in 1990-92. As the most populous region in the world, Asia is home to two out of three of the world's undernourished people.

There has been the least progress in the sub- Saharan region, where more than one in four people remain undernourished - the highest prevalence of any region in the world. Nevertheless, the prevalence of undernourishment in sub-Saharan Africa has declined from 33.2 percent in 1990- 92 to 23.2 percent in 2014-16, although the number of undernourished people has actually increased.

Hunger continues to take its largest toll in terms of the number of people impacted in Southern Asia, which includes the countries of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The estimate of 276 million chronically undernourished people in 2014-16 is only marginally lower than the number in 1990- 92. Eastern Asia (where China is by far the largest country) and South-eastern Asia (including Indonesia, Philippines, Mynamar, Vietnam and others) have reduced undernutriton substantially.

Latin America has the most successful developing region record in increasing food security.

2015 marks the end of the monitoring period for the two internationally agreed targets for hunger reduction. The target for the Millennium Development Goals for developing countries as a whole was to halve the proportion of hungry people by 2015 from the base year(s) of 1990-2, or from 23.2% to ll.6%. As the proportion in 2014-16 is 12.9%, the goal has almost been met. As can be seen from the table, East Asia, South East Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean regions have met the goal.

World Food Summit target. The target set at the 1996 World Food Summit was to halve the number of undernourished people by 2015 from their number in 1990-92. Since 1990-92, the number of hungry people in developing regions has fallen by over 200 million, from 991 million to 790.7 million. However the goal is 495 million (1/2 of 991 million), which means that the target will not be reached.

(Source: FAO et al, 2015 pp 8-12)

Children are the most visible victims of undernutrition. Black et. al. (2013) estimate that undernutrition in the aggregate-including fetal growth restriction, stunting, wasting, and deficiencies of vitamin A and zinc along with suboptimum breastfeeding-is a cause of 3·1 million child deaths annually or 45% of all child deaths in 2011 (Black et al. 2013). Undernutrition magnifies the effect of every disease, including measles and malaria. The estimated proportions of deaths in which undernutrition is an underlying cause are roughly similar for diarrhea (61%), malaria (57%), pneumonia (52%), and measles (45%) (Black 2003, Bryce 2005). Malnutrition can also be caused by diseases, such as the diseases that cause diarrhea, by reducing the body's ability to convert food into usable nutrients.
Stunting

Globally 161 million under-five year olds were estimated to be stunted in 2013.

The global trend in stunting prevalence and numbers affected is decreasing. Between 2000 and 2013 stunting prevalence declined from 33% to 25% and numbers declined from 199 million to 161 million.

In 2013, about half of all stunted children lived in Asia and over one third in Africa. (UNICEF et al. 2014b)

Wasting and severe wasting

Globally, 51 million under-five year olds were wasted and 17 million were severely wasted in 2013.

Globally, wasting prevalence in 2013 was estimated at almost 8% and nearly a third of that was for severe wasting, totaling 3%.

In 2013, approximately two thirds of all wasted children lived in Asia and almost one third in Africa, with similar proportions for severely wasted children. (UNICEF et al. 2014b)

Take a three-question hunger quiz on this section
Quite a few trace elements or micronutrients-vitamins and minerals-are important for health. Three very important micronutrient deficiencies in terms of health consequences for poor people in developing countries are:
Iron

In developing countries every second pregnant woman and about 40% of preschool children are estimated to be anemic.

In many developing countries, iron deficiency anemia is aggravated by worm infections, malaria and other infectious diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis.

The major health consequences include poor pregnancy outcome, impaired physical and cognitive development, increased risk of morbidity in children and reduced work productivity in adults. Anemia contributes to 20% of all maternal deaths. (WHO Iron Deficiency Anemia)

Vitamin A

Vitamin A deficiency can cause night blindness and reduces the body's resistance to disease. In children Vitamin A deficiency can also cause growth retardation.

An estimated 250 million preschool children are vitamin A deficient. An estimated 250,000 to 500 000 vitamin A-deficient children become blind every year, half of them dying within 12 months of losing their sight. (WHO Vitamin A Deficiencies)

Iodine

Iodine deficiency is one of the main cause of impaired cognitive development in children.

Serious iodine deficiency during pregnancy can result in stillbirth, spontaneous abortion, and congenital abnormalities such as cretinism, a grave, irreversible form of mental retardation that affects people living in iodine-deficient areas of Africa and Asia.

Iodine deficiency has a simple solution: iodized salt. Thanks to this intervention, the number of countries where iodine deficiency is a public health problem has halved over the past decade. However 54 countries still have a serious iodine deficiency problem. (WHO Iodine Deficiencies)

The world produces enough food to feed everyone. For the world as a whole, per capita food availability has risen from about 2220 kcal/person/day in the early 1960s to 2790 kcal/person/day in 2006-08, while developing countries even recorded a leap from 1850 kcal/person/day to over 2640 kcal/person/day. This growth in food availability in conjunction with improved access to food helped reduce the percentage of chronically undernourished people in developing countries from 34 percent in the mid 1970s to just 15 percent three decades later. (FAO 2012, p. 4) A principal problem is that many people in the world still do not have sufficient income to purchase (or land to grow) enough food or access to nutritious food. This is an element of "food access". The FAO defines four dimensions of food security, all of which must be fulfilled simultaneously, for food security to exist. The four dimensions are: 1) physical availability of food, 2) economic and physical access to food, 3) food utilization, and 4) the stability of those other dimensions over time.

What are the causes of hunger is a fundamental question, with varied answers.

Poverty is the principal cause of hunger. The causes of poverty include poor people's lack of resources, unequal income distribution in the world and within specific countries, conflict, and hunger itself. As of 2016 (2012 statistics), the World Bank has estimated that there were 896 million poor people in developing countries who live on $1.90 a day or less. This compares with compared with 1.95 billion in 1990, and 1.99 billion in 1981. This means that 12.7 percent of people in the developing world lived at or below $1.90 a day in 2011, down from 37 percent in 1990 and 44 percent in 1981. (This compares with the FAO estimate above of 791 million people living in chronic undernourishment in developing countries.)

Progress has been slower at higher poverty lines. Over 2.1 billion people in the developing world lived on less than US $ 3.10 a day in 2012, compared with 2.9 billion in 1990- so even though the share of the population living under that threshold nearly halved, from 66 percent in 1990 to 35 percent in 2012, far too many people are living with far too little. (World Bank Poverty Overview)

Progress in poverty reduction has been concentrated in Asia, and especially, East Asia, with the major improvement occurring in China. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the number of people in extreme poverty has increased. The statement that 'poverty is the principal cause of hunger' is, though correct, unsatisfying. Why then are (so many) people poor? The next sections discuss some of the causes.

Conflict. For 2012, the first and latest year for which its estimates are available, the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) estimates that more than 172 million people were affected by conflict worldwide. Of this total 149 million or 87 percent were conflict-affected residents (CARs). Internally displaced persons (IDPs) accounted for another 18 million and refugees for five million. CRED says that the global total is higher because its figures only include 24 countries for which comparable and validated data are available. CRED observes

Pakistan with 28 million and Nigeria with nearly 19 million had the largest numbers of people affected by conflict.

Libya and Somalia had the highest proportion of their populations affected by violence and insecurity at about 90 percent each.

IDPs suffer the worst health impacts of conflict. They and their children are almost twice as likely as refugees to die from conflict-related causes, particularly disease and starvation.

Conflict-affected residents also suffer significantly higher death rates than refugees (CRED 2013).

The estimated number of conflict-affected residents (172 million) represents 21 percent of the estimated number of undernourished people (805 million), which gives an approximate idea of the importance of conflict as a cause of hunger. And for 2015 statistics on refugees, see UNHCR 2016.

Hunger is also a cause of poverty, and thus of hunger. By causing poor health, small body size, low levels of energy, and reductions in mental functioning, hunger can lead to even greater poverty by reducing people's ability to work and learn, thus leading to even greater hunger. See Victoria et al. 2008.

World population A large world population does make it more difficult to provide a decent standard of living for all. Population growth rates have dropped substantially over the last 50 years. See Population Reference Bureau 2015 for analysis of population trends.

Food and agricultural policy. Low agricultural productivity, post harvest loss, and a lack of nutritious food are important factors. For two sources that discuss these issues, see IFPRI 2014 and Institute for Development Studies HANCI.

Climate change. Climate change is increasingly viewed as a current and future cause of hunger and poverty. Increasing drought, flooding, and changing climatic patterns requiring a shift in crops and farming practices that may not be easily accomplished are three key issues. See the Hunger Notes special report: Hunger, the environment, and climate change for further information, especially articles in the section: Climate change, global warming and the effect on poor people such as Global warming causes 300,000 deaths a year, study says and Could food shortages bring down civilization?

(Updated December 28, 2016)

Bibliography

Black, Robert E, Cesar G Victora, Susan P Walker, Zulfiqar A Bhutta, Parul Christian, Mercedes de Onis, Majid Ezzati, Sally Grantham-McGregor, Joanne Katz, Reynaldo Martorell, Ricardo Uauy, the Maternal and Child Nutrition Study Group. 2013. "Maternal and child undernutrition and overweight in low-income and middle-income countries." Lancet Volume 382, No. 9890, p 427-451. http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2813%2960937-X/abstract (The article is available free of charge, but you will be required to register with Lancet.) Accessed September 2016.

Black RE, Morris SS, Bryce J. "Where and why are 10 million children dying every year?" Lancet. 2003 Jun 28;361(9376):2226-34. Accessed September 2016.

Black, Robert E, Lindsay H Allen, Zulfiqar A Bhutta, Laura E Caulfield, Mercedes de Onis, Majid Ezzati, Colin Mathers, Juan Rivera, for the Maternal and Child Undernutrition Study Group Maternal and child undernutrition: global and regional exposures and health consequences. (Article access is free but will require registration) The Lancet Vol. 371, Issue 9608, 19 January 2008, 243-260. Accessed September 2016.

Jennifer Bryce, Cynthia Boschi-Pinto, Kenji Shibuya, Robert E. Black, and the WHO Child Health Epidemiology Reference Group. 2005. "WHO estimates of the causes of death in children." Lancet ; 365: 1147-52. Accessed September 2016.

Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters. 2013. "People affected by conflict: Humanitarian needs in numbers." http://cred.be/sites/default/files/PAC2013.pdf Accessed September 2016.

Food and Agriculture Organization. 2008. An Introduction to the Basic Concepts of Food Security. http://www.fao.org/docrep/013/al936e/al936e00.pdf Accessed June 2017.

Food and Agriculture Organization. 2012. FAO Statistical Yearbook 2012 http://www.fao.org/docrep/015/i2490e/i2490e03a.pdf Accessed September 2016.

Food and Agriculture Organization, International Fund for Agricultural Development, World Food Program. 2015. "The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2015. Strengthening the enabling environment for food security and nutrition." Rome: FAO.

Institute of Development Studies. "Hunger and Nutrition Commitment Index." http://www.hancindex.org/ Accessed September 2016.

International Food Policy Research Institute. 2014. 2014 Global Food Policy Report. Accessed September 2016.

International Food Policy Research Institute. 2015. 2015 Global Hunger Index. https://www.ifpri.org/publication/2015-global-hunger-index-armed-conflict-and-challenge-hunger Accessed September 2016.

International Food Policy Research Institute. 2016. 2016 Global Hunger Index. http://www.ifpri.org/publication/2016-global-hunger-index-getting-zero-hunger Accessed December 2016.

Oxford University Press. 1971. Oxford English Dictionary. Definition for malnutrition.

Population Reference Bureau. 2016. "2015 World Population Data Sheet." http://www.prb.org/pdf15/2015-world-population-data-sheet_eng.pdf Accessed September 2016.

Rosen, Stacey, Karen Thorne and Birgit Meade. 2016. International Food Security Assessment, 2016-26. Economic Research Service, United States Department of Agriculture. Accessed December 2016.

UNHCR 2016 "Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2015." 2016. https://s3.amazonaws.com/unhcrsharedmedia/2016/2016-06-20-global-trends/2016-06-14-Global-Trends-2015.pdf Accessed December 2016.

UNICEF, WHO, The World Bank. 2014a. "Levels and Trends in Child Malnutrition." http://www.who.int/nutgrowthdb/estimates2013/en/ Accessed September 2016.

UNICEF-WHO-The World Bank. 2014b "Summary of key facts about the 2013 joint malnutrition estimates." http://www.who.int/entity/nutgrowthdb/summary_jme_2013.pdf?ua=1 Accessed September 2016.

Cesar G. Victora, Linda Adair, Caroline Fall, Pedro C Hallal, Reynaldo Martorell, Linda Richter, and Harshpal Singh Sachdev. 2008. "Maternal and child undernutrition: consequences for adult health and human capital." Lancet. 2008 Jan 26; 371(9609): 340-357. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2258311/ Accessed September 2016.

World Bank. 2016. Poverty website. http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty and the Overview page http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/overview Accessed September 2016.

World Bank. 2013. "The State of the World's Poor: Where are the Poor and where are they the Poorest?" http://www.worldbank.org/content/dam/Worldbank/document/State_of_the_poor_paper_April17.pdf Accessed September 2016.

World Health Organization WHO Global Database on Child Growth and Malnutrition http://www.who.int/nutgrowthdb/en/ Accessed September 2016.

World Health Organization Comparative Quantification of Health Risks: Childhood and Maternal Undernutrition http://www.who.int/publications/cra/en/ Accessed September 2016.

World Health Organization. "Micronutrient Deficiencies." http://www.who.int/nutrition/topics/micronutrients/en/ Accessed September 2016.

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World Hunger, Poverty Facts, Statistics 2016 - World Hunger News

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This fact sheet is divided into the following sections: Hunger is a term which has three meanings (Oxford English Dictionary 1971) the uneasy or painful sensation caused by want of food; craving appetite.

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Latest News on Hunger in US, Africa, Asia, Global - World Hunger News

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Since 1976 World Hunger Education Service has helped Fight Hunger Through Knowledge as a resource of information & policy guidance. We will end world hunger

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Malin, Ashley J. and Alberta E. Pos. "The Impact of Early Empathy on Alliance Building, Emotional Processing, and Outcome during Experiential Treatment of Depression." Psychotherapy Research, vol. 25, no. 4, July 2015, pp. 445-459. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/10503307.2014.901572.

In this study, empathy was found to establish an alliance and bond between therapists and patients. By building an empathetic foundation, the relationship between their patient and themselves is benefitted. The most important part about this connection was the first meeting and how they were able to bond within the first hour using empathetic tactics. They would measure their success based on reports from clients and how they believed the meeting went. This goes far beyond patients and therapist, in a world where people can positively affect others through their interactions and becoming empathetic. This would lead to better human interactions and experiences as well as a better outlook for the future.

My shadow are the actions I do to impact the world in a positive way around me. It is the lasting impact that I leave wherever I go and shows my effect and presence in the area. I impact the world through service in my youth group as well as the day to day deeds that I do to help individuals in any simple way, including small tasks in and outside of the classroom. As I move through my education I am hoping to leave a footprint everywhere I go, if this may be Virginia Tech I will be a part of their service projects leading the life of a Hokie and fulfilling my responsibilities as a Blacksburg resident. As my real education will stop after college I will continue on in my path down education of life. During this journey I will benefit my community and world by positively affecting those surrounding me, I will lead those who need to be taught and start in the education of the youth to ensure that they are able to embed themselves in the making of their on shadows.

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Malin, Ashley J. and Alberta E. Pos. "The Impact of Early Empathy on Alliance Building, Emotional Processing, and Outcome during Experiential Treatment of Depression." Psychotherapy Research, vol. 25, no. 4, July 2015, pp. 445-459. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/10503307.2014.901572. In this study, empathy was found to establish an alliance and bond between therapists and patients.

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12/8 In order to help develop empathy in others we need to be active in our communities. Part of the reason people struggle with empathy is because they don't understand people's backgrounds. People don't understand backgrounds because they have not been involved in the community and have not learned interacted with other people and understood their story.

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About a month ago, I started a "5 for 5" campaign where I raised enough money to buy five wheelchairs for disabled people in third world countries. What separates a campaign like this from others is that firstly, it is connected to Wheels for the World and secondly, the wheelchairs are recycled and repaired by inmates. These wheelchairs will give five different people an opportunity at life that they never had before.

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About a month ago, I started a "5 for 5" campaign where I raised enough money to buy five wheelchairs for disabled people in third world countries. What separates a campaign like this from others is that firstly, it is connected to Wheels for the World and secondly, the wheelchairs are recycled and repaired by inmates.

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Statistics can look stark. 1 in 3 people on the planet don't have a decent toilet. 1 in 9 don't have clean water close to home.

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World Health Organization

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UN urges governments to ensure supplies for all.

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America's water issues extend far beyond the current crisis in Flint, Michigan - and it's going to take a massive infrastructure investment to protect citizens from serious public health dangers, say experts.

In light of World Water Day, on March 22, the White House, along with about 150 other institutions, pledged more than $5 billion to improve water accessibility and quality across the nation, acknowledging that "water challenges are facing communities and regions across the United States, impacting millions of lives and costing billions of dollars in damages."

In fact, data CNBC obtained from the Environmental Protection Agency reveals that only nine U.S. states are reporting safe levels of lead in their water supply. These include Alabama, Arkansas, Hawaii, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nevada, North Dakota, South Dakota and Tennessee.

According to the EPA, 41 states had Action Level Exceedance (ALEs) in the last three fiscal years, meaning states have reported higher than acceptable levels of lead in drinking water.

On its website, the EPA published a regulation in 1991 - known as the Lead and Copper Rule - to control lead and copper in drinking water.

"If the action level for lead is exceeded, the system must also inform the public about steps they should take to protect their health and may have to replace lead service lines under their control," the website states.

Furthermore, the EPA told CNBC that of the more than 7,000 schools subject to the EPA Lead and Copper Rule, 431 reported heightened levels of lead between 2012 and 2015.

Lynn Thorp, the national campaigns director at Clean Water Action, told CNBC that of particular concern in Lead and Copper Rule compliance data would be public water systems with repeated exceedances of the action level.

"If over 10 percent of samples are showing lead at the tap over 15 parts per billion, and this is occurring over and over again, this is a signal that controlling corrosion from lead in pipes and plumbing is not working," Thorp said.

The director did add, though, that because lead levels can vary in any one place and over time, "an exceedance should prompt system action, investigation and notification, but it should not be used to draw conclusions about statewide lead levels at the tap."

Experts say, however, that the focus should not necessarily be on water quality in the United States, which is fairly high, but rather with the infrastructure that is delivering the water to our homes, schools, daycares and cities.

Casey Dinges, the American Society of Civil Engineers senior managing director, told CNBC that the infrastructure conveying the water is in "serious need of investment right now."

"If we don't increase investment in these areas, we're putting at risk by the year 2020 over $400 billion in U.S. GDP, 700,000 jobs would be endangered, and over half a trillion dollars in personal income would be at risk." -Casey Dinges, senior managing director, American Society of Civil Engineers

"If we continue on the path that we are on now, and if we don't increase investment in these areas, we're putting at risk by the year 2020 over $400 billion in U.S. GDP, 700,000 jobs would be endangered, and over half a trillion dollars in personal income would be at risk," Dinges said.

Those investments include pouring money into pipes, water treatment plants and other water infrastructure.

Dinges says it would cost a little more than $80 billion over a nine-year period to protect businesses from losing about $150 billion and could protect homeowners from about $60 billion in costs associated with water-related issues.

"The cost-benefit ratio of about an $80 billion investment yielding over $200 billion in savings for the country ... is a good investment for us to make," Dinges said.

The water situation in Newark, New Jersey, schools is now in the spotlight as well.

John Abeigon, president of the Newark Teachers Union, told CNBC that Newark public schools are a "mini-Flint," with tests revealing that at least 30 schools in the city show lead contaminated water samples.

"It could be in the upwards of $10 [million] to $20 million dollars to retrofit the plumbing in some of these buildings. Some of these buildings are over a century and a half old," Abeigon said.

The Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., based nonprofit public policy organization, published a report saying that better regional measures should be in place in order to improve water infrastructure.

Among the steps Brookings suggests that local areas can take to improve these issues includes increasing transparency on any water data collected, producing more detailed metrics of the infrastructure itself and conducting more frequent testing.

"It is in part an infrastructure crisis, but it is also a case of gaps in government oversight at all levels, of ill-thought austerity and of not being aggressively proactive in taking the job of protecting, treating and distributing drinking water as a public health issue," Clean Water Action's Thorp said.

Erik Olson, senior strategic director with the Natural Resources Defense Council, agrees. "The Flint water crisis is extreme, but it's not the only case of lead-contaminated tap water in America. Lead problems exist across the nation, but deficient data reporting, often nonexistent state oversight and an utter lack of accountability by state and federal governments keeps the widespread problem of lead in drinking water largely out of sight," he said.

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America's water worries are bigger than Flint

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America's water issues extend far beyond the current crisis in Flint, Michigan - and it's going to take a massive infrastructure investment to protect citizens from serious public health dangers, say experts.

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It's World Water Day today!  Please consider making a donation to a charity like water.org to help people get clean water.

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Each month the Elsevier Atlas Award recognizes research that could significantly impact people's lives around the world.

March 2017 winner
The role of social actors in water access in Sub-Saharan Africa: Evidence from Malawi and Zambia
Ted Scanlon, Obinna Paul Uguru, Tahseen Jafry, Blessings Chinsinga, Peter Mvula, Joseph Chunga, Lilian Mukuka Zimba, Mwansa Mwape, Lucy Nyundo, Brian Mwiinga, Kevin Chungu
Water Resources and Rural Development, Volume 8, November 2016, Pages 25-36

A heavily pregnant woman walks slowly along the road to the hospital in Malawi, carrying a 20-liter bucket of water on her head. She is in labor, and she stops frequently as it's too excruciating to balance the water during contractions. But she has to bring it with her, otherwise she won't be able to give birth in the hospital.

The sixth Sustainable Development Goal is ' clean water and sanitation '. But despite the increased attention this has brought, access to water in Sub-Saharan Africa is worse than ever: there are more people without access to water now than there were in 1990.

In order to fix the problem - and make sure women don't have to dig for and carry their own water to hospital - we need to understand what's going wrong with our current approaches. That was the aim of an Atlas Award-winning study in Water Resources and Rural Development, by researchers at Glasgow Caledonian University in Scotland, the University of Malawi in Malawi and the University of Lusaka in Zambia.

"The thing that's underpinning the problems associated with lack of access or availability or supply of water is our changing climate, with climate variability being really significant," said Professor Tahseen Jafry, corresponding author of the study from Glasgow Caledonian University. "And there are all kinds of sociopolitical and institutional bottlenecks that prevent particularly the poorest and most vulnerable people getting access to a resource that should be considered a basic human right."

Current approaches to providing water have so far been ineffective. Because government efforts to improve access have failed, a number of social actors - NGOs, community and faith-based organizations, private companies and others - have stepped in to try and fix the situation.

The result is a complex web of activity, which Prof. Jafry and her colleagues wanted to untangle. Through interviews, focus group discussions and workshops, they analyzed the different approaches of these social actors, and looked at how they are working together to provide access to water in Malawi and Zambia.

Despite the many actors involved, they discovered a lack of strategic coordination and cooperation: every organization has its own agenda and approach, and while some overlap they don't all align strategically.

"What we found was that in this complex mix, there is a need to come together and focus more clearly on providing water for those that need it," Prof. Jafry explained. "What we need is strong leadership from the government. I think we need to put the Sustainable Development Goals at the heart of the developmental policies, but also putting at the core of that a perception of rights and responsibilities amongst all the social actors. It's almost like creating a consolidated voice for water and making sure that that consolidation is heard not from top down, but also, more significantly, bottom up."

As well as bringing the various voices together to improve access to water, Prof. Jafry believes we will only solve the broader problems of climate change by putting people at the heart of the solutions - through climate justice, equity and rights:

"There's a lot of rhetoric around climate change adaptation and mitigation, but I think what needs to be embedded in that conversation is issues around climate justice, or injustice, to highlight a more people and social dimension to the climate change challenges ahead. That should influence how we address the climate challenges moving forward, of which water is a key element."

A conversation with Prof. Tahseen Jafry

Access to water in Sub-Saharan Africa is worse than ever: there are more people without access to water now than there were more than two decades ago. Because of ineffective government interventions, a complex web of social actors has grown to ensure universal access to water. So why isn't it working? We talked to author Prof. Tahseen Jafry to find out how these social actors are working together to improve access to water, and what needs to be done to improve the situation.

In this podcast, Prof. Tahseen Jafry talks about access to water from a social justice perspective, and explains why we need to put people at the heart of our climate solutions. Listen now
What is the problem with water?
Access to water is a problem that's more significant now than it was more than a decade ago. I think the thing that's underpinning the problems associated with lack of access or availability or supply of water is our changing climate, with climate variability being really significant. There are periods of significant drought or flooding, which also exacerbates the problem. The other problem is how the water can reach those that need it the most, and I think there are all kinds of sociopolitical and institutional bottlenecks that prevent particularly the poorest and most vulnerable people getting access to a resource that should be considered a basic human right.
What have some of the previous approaches been to improving access to water and why haven't they worked?
In countries such as Zambia and Malawi, which is where our research was conducted, I get a sense that provision of water is almost dependent on donors coming in to help bridge that gap and get water to people that need it the most. The way it's done normally is through technical fixes such as putting in boreholes for pumps or solar panels, but these are short term and have their own constraints and issues. We're looking at addressing the problem not with a technical fix but from a more social justice and a capacity-building need.
Why did you decide to investigate this area?
I'm looking at things from a climate injustice perspective. A just approach is about identifying a more transformative approach to tackling climate change and we consider that it's humanity's responsibility to address climate change and really look at issues of justice, equity, rights, and access for the poorest and most vulnerable people. Our interest in this area was to look at this problem and try to get a deeper understanding of why people don't have water.

Women will be on their hands and knees digging scoop holes in the ground with their bare hands, to try and find water. It's just inhumane. When we were looking at this, we were convinced that something is not right, something is not working. Projects have been coming and going but have not been able to address the problem. We wanted to try and understand why. What is going on, really?
What did you do in your research?
What we wanted to do was to understand more about the role of social actors. By that I mean who are the stakeholders involved in the provision of water in Zambia and Malawi? It's obviously not just donors. It's governments and NGOs, the private sector, communities themselves and community-based organizations. We wanted to understand the interrelationship between this group of social actors to figure out what they are doing, and what it is that they're not doing where the gaps are in the provision of water to people. Why is it that their approaches and their mechanisms and their ideas are not getting to the poorest and most vulnerable people, to those women that are having to dig with their bare hands in the ground?
What were your main findings?
We did find that the provision of water is multifaceted; there are so many stakeholders involved. But what we found was this lack of strategic coordination and, I would say, cooperation in the sector. It would appear that every social actor has their own agenda, has their own ideas, has their own approach, to the provision of water. Some overlap with each other and some are at tangents with each other. What we found was that in this complex mix, the need to come together and focus more clearly on providing water for those that need it.
What do you think needs to be done to achieve this goal?
What we need is strong leadership from the government. I think we need to put the Sustainable Development Goals at the heart of the developmental policies to underpin the trajectory and the direction in which things need to be designed and developed, but also putting at the core of that a perception of rights and responsibilities amongst all the social actors and that ranges from the community's rights through to government. It's almost like creating a consolidated voice for water and making sure that that consolidation is heard not from top down, but also, more significantly, bottom up.

Atlas Advisory Board Commentary

"The article was chosen for being a thorough identification of stakeholders in water access. Strong analysis to convince governments and investors to implement long term intervention for universal water access."

Further reading

About Water Resources and Rural Development

Water plays a critical role in providing livelihood opportunities and sustaining the health and welfare of rural families around the world. Water Resources and Rural Development publishes papers describing the role of water resources in supporting livelihood activities in rural areas, with a focus on the impacts of water resources policy and management on rural livelihoods and household welfare.

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Greetings from Malawi! 5/29/2021 With the Covid-19 pandemic we have come up against challenges with traveling, however, after 2 long years we finally have the opportunity to return to Malawi and visit our newest developments. As it is

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Greetings from Malawi! 5/29/2021 With the Covid-19 pandemic we have come up against challenges with traveling, however, after 2 long years we finally have the opportunity to return to Malawi and visit our newest developments. As it is

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What would it take to ensure that everyone in the world had access to clean water? I'm prompted to ask this question in response to a recent New York Times Magazine article, which focused on Charity: Water, an organization that has reportedly raised $100 million to finance water projects in the developing world, making it the largest water-focused nonprofit in the United States.

The message that wealthy donors can solve the world's water crisis is misleading.

Charity: Water has done an important job raising public awareness about the world's water crisis and demonstrated remarkable fundraising ability - engaging both "micro-philanthropists" and wealthy entrepreneurs. The organization's fundraising is guided by the imperative of giving its donors a satisfying experience. However, to do this, Charity: Water has had to simplify the problem and narrow in on one piece of the solution - the piece with the most potential to deliver that experience: individualized water projects, like wells or purification systems, that can be photographed, located on Google Maps, and commemorated with plaques featuring donors' names. To get the work done, the organization identifies partner organizations across the developing world with track records of delivering results, and provides flexible funding to meet local needs.

Charity: Water aims to show through the growth of its philanthropic work that the world's water crisis is solvable. The message it effectively conveys is: if enough affluent people in the West were generous enough to pay for water projects in poor countries, we could fix the problem. This message is misleading - and it doesn't serve the interests of the organization's donors, other water organizations, or people who are beyond the reach of Charity: Water.

Let's put this problem in perspective. The World Health Organization has estimated that it would require investments totaling $535 billion between 2011 and 2015 to provide universal access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation. This problem cannot be solved by scaling philanthropy. It's like using an "adopt-a-highway" approach to solve the world's transportation problems. To fix this problem, governments and businesses must take the lead.

Philanthropists have a vital role to play in the solution, just as they have played key roles advancing many movements - from abolition to women's suffrage to gay rights. But when the problem is vast and grant resources are relatively scarce, philanthropy needs to be used catalytically. By promising its donors a good experience - short-term results and heart-warming photos - Charity: Water limits the range of activities it can support.

One person who has thought long and hard about what it would take to make a dent in the world's water crisis is Gary White, a co-founder with Matt Damon of Water.org. White has spent the past 30 years addressing this problem and he has gone through a personal learning process that mirrors the world's learning process. It's an instructive story.

White is the quintessential Midwestern problem solver: public minded, modest and earnest. In the 1980s, when he was a 20-year-old student, he traveled to Guatemala, where he first encountered children playing next to refuse piles and drinking from ponds and streams contaminated with waste. White found himself overwhelmed speaking with parents who had lost young children as a result of water-borne illnesses.

As a budding engineer, he thought he knew the solution: dig wells. He reasoned that no job in the world could be as important. "I knew then that my life was going to be about water," he recalled. "It's one of those things I never doubted."

In university, he traveled to the Philippines and designed a water catchment system for a village. He wrote his thesis about it. He could see his career unfolding. He would travel the world helping villagers get clean water. He pictured himself surrounded by smiling children and appreciative parents.

The myth of the white knight riding in to save the day has long dominated children's literature and development work, and White was not immune to the story line. He even enrolled in flight school, thinking that, as a pilot, he'd be able to visit more villages.

After graduating, he joined the Catholic Relief Services to oversee water and sanitation programs for Latin America. He set out traveling around the region to inspect projects, and was sobered by the reality. Again and again, he came across the same scene: wells broken and abandoned. When he tested the functioning ones he found that, in many cases, the water was more contaminated than the river or pond water the villagers had been advised to avoid.

His and others' research indicated that half of all water and sanitation projects in the developing world at the time were failures.

Why? First, during the 1960s and 1970s, compassionate young people, inspired by the Peace Corps and President Kennedy's call to service, went abroad to fix the world. They were strong on idealism, but weak on practical skills. They made lots of mistakes.

By the time the 1980s rolled around, people had gotten smarter: they saw that development was not for amateurs, but for people who knew how to build wells and roads, run hospitals and agriculture projects. Around the world, the experts got to work; many launched new nongovernmental organizations. But they ran into an array of new problems: How do you change behavior? How do you ensure sustainability? How do you deal with corrupt or incompetent governments?

White saw patterns. For example, if a well is installed in a village but locals lacked a sense of pride or ownership for it, it would eventually break down and fall out of use. Similarly, if locals lacked the organizational skills, knowledge, or funds, to maintain the pump, or if there was no reliable supply chain for parts or tools, or if locals had insufficient appreciation for the importance of hygiene, water would stop flowing. In urban areas, he saw that the main thing that many residents needed was money to purchase a water connection or a pit latrine (something that was especially desired by women - for dignity, comfort and safety concerns).

As White discovered, and as my colleague Tina Rosenberg has reported in this column, these aspects of the work were often overlooked - and as a consequence the world is now littered with billions of dollars worth of broken wells and pumps. Many of them functioned for less than two years.

White studied the failures. He kept a journal and took photographs. He forced his colleagues to sit through slide shows to learn from the mistakes. Gradually, a new set of realizations set in. In 1990, he founded an organization, WaterPartners (which merged with H2O Africa in 2009 to become Water.org), to implement his ideas. He saw that villagers had to take charge of their own development, so his teams worked to help them organize water and sanitation committees; he saw that water and sanitation had to be addressed together; and he saw that sustainability had to be a primary consideration at the outset, not an add-on.

After almost two decades and considerable success, he remained frustrated, however: he reasoned that using a traditional charitable approach, it would take generations to address the world's water needs. True, every little bit helped. But perhaps there was a better way.

In the past few years, White has developed a model he thinks could reach hundreds of millions of people. The idea is to take advantage of a historically new global opportunity: the explosion of microfinance. He and his colleagues have pioneered WaterCredit, a program that uses philanthropy to jump start a market among microfinance organizations so they get into the business of making water and sanitation loans.

What they have found is that, with reasonably priced loans, many households and communities in the developing world can install water connections, build latrines and wells, and tap into continuing capital sources to maintain them. Many communities will need government subsidies, as well; but microloans can often incite changes far more quickly than waiting for governments or charities to arrive.

WaterCredit is still a young idea. Water.org has invested $7.4 million in 30 microfinance organizations to date; they, in turn, have extended 150,500 loans totaling $28 million for water access and sanitation. So far, 840,000 people have benefited, 92 percent of the loans have gone to women, and the repayment rate is 98 percent. What's significant about this approach is its leverage and systemic attack. There are thousands of microfinance organizations globally and the field is growing each year; they have the ability to tap into capital markets, and reach more than 200 million families. The world is just discovering how this platform could be deployed.

There are other models that warrant attention, as well. Groups that help local or national governments expand and improve public systems are often tough to market to donors, but they can have big impact. And where governments are cash strapped or unresponsive, social businesses are filling the gap, often more sustainably than charities. For instance, Water Health International installs low-cost but effective water treatment systems in rural areas in South Asia and Africa and has provided access to safe water to 5 million people, who pay modest fees. Another company, Sanergy, is developing a franchising business for low-cost sanitation centers in slums in Nairobi, Kenya. In both cases, the villagers or slum dwellers are not beneficiaries, but customers.

Companies like these seek profits not by bypassing the poor or raising prices, as some water privatization schemes have done, but by developing affordable services to serve them on an ongoing basis. "There's a need not only for more funding for the water issue, but also for continued innovation," explains Yasmina Zaidman, director of communications and strategic partnerships for Acumen, a nonprofit venture capital fund that has invested in both companies. "Market-based approaches alone are not the answer - and have sometimes been part of the problem. But there is a role for socially minded businesses and social investment in building solutions that scale."

When an organization like Charity: Water takes off, as it has, with all the buzz and fanfare, it's important to take a measured view. While it may be exciting to ponder how much money the tech mogul will give you when his company goes public, it's more useful to ask: How will you avoid the project-sustainability problems that have plagued others over the past 40 years? How would you decide if there were better ways to direct your money? And: If you should decide to shift your approach, how will you bring your donors along - so they become better educated about the problem as they mature with you?

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David Bornstein is the author of "How to Change the World," which has been published in 20 languages, and "The Price of a Dream: The Story of the Grameen Bank," and is co-author of "Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know." He is a co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network, which supports rigorous reporting about responses to social problems.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What would it take to ensure that everyone in the world had access to clean water? I'm prompted to ask this question in response to a recent New York Times Magazine article, which focused on Charity: Water, an organization that has reportedly raised $100 million to finance water projects in the developing world, making it the largest water-focused nonprofit in the United States.