Clean water global concern for School of Public Health

Water flowing from faucet to drinking glass

Safe drinking water is essential to everyone! In the extreme case, we cannot survive for more than a couple of days without water. A major focus of Carolina’s School of Public Health is finding ways to provide clean water for people across North Carolina and around the world. Through the Drinking Water Research Center, the Superfund Basic Research and Training Program, and many other programs and research projects, faculty, students and staff are making a difference in one of the world’s most precious resources.Why are we so committed to clean water? For the majority of people living in the United States, clean water is provided at the tap by our local water utility. The sources of fresh water include surface waters from rivers, lakes, and reservoirs and ground water from aquifers.

Rivers can be a source of ground water.

Surface water requires treatment to insure that any pathogenic micro-organisms and harmful chemical contaminants are removed before distributing the water to consumers. Ground water may also require some treatment before distribution.

For some segments of our population, safe drinking water is difficult to obtain. Some individuals may be located in areas where a municipal or community water supply is not available and the local ground water may be contaminated or may be too expensive to withdraw from the aquifer.

The availability of sufficient quantities of safe water for all uses — including agriculture, industry, commercial and domestic use — is important to us locally, across the United States and around the world.

Local to Global

The problems of water resources are ubiquitous; they transcend local, state, national and continental boundaries, and they are posing increasingly greater challenges for society.

Consider the location of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which is in a relatively water-rich part of the world. The local water and sewer authority recently made a major shift in how it serves its customers by reclaiming wastewater for use by the University to better conserve the authority’s fresh-water resources and to meet an ever-growing demand for clean water. This change, while local and seemingly small, has far-reaching implications when multiplied by similar actions in other communities and states to ensure adequate fresh-water for future uses.

A dam in the southwestern United States

At the state level in North Carolina, most communities east of I-95 rely exclusively on groundwater, 75% of which must be replaced within the next 15 years by far more expensive surface water that is of poorer quality. These communities likely will have to work with each other to establish regional water authorities to develop future water supplies and to build treatment facilities and distribution networks to meet consumer needs; the impacts on North Carolina’s economy are expected to be substantial.

At the national level, the arid southwestern United States is rapidly growing in population and faces critical water shortages. Depletion of flows in major rivers spreads water shortage issues across state and national boundaries (e.g., the United States and Mexico in the Colorado River basin), while the tendency to pump underground water sources at unsustainable rates has endangered their long term viability. New research suggests that water resources challenges will become more formidable as climate change raises the likelihood of extreme droughts and tropical storms.

An aqueduct carries water.

Globally, water resources development and management is one of the most important issues facing society. Billions of people live without adequate or safe supplies of drinking water, large areas of the developing world now face chronic and growing water scarcity, and poor countries will be affected most dramatically by climate change. Examples of important water resource issues in developing countries include the following:

• The lack of improved water supplies for one billion persons
• The impact on water supply caused by 2.4 billion people on the planet who lack sufficient waste disposal facilities
• Growing scarcity of water due to increasing population and the need for technical and institutional solutions to ensure more efficient, sustainable use of the resource
• The possible alterations in rainfall patterns and intensity due to climate change
• Insufficient infrastructure to ameliorate the damages from both droughts and floods
• Severely degraded water environments resulting from over-exploitation – rivers that have run dry, wetlands that have dried up, and aquifers that have been mined
• Insufficient attention to the integrated management of land and water as development occurs
• Inadequate supplies of potable drinking water for rapidly growing megacities in the developing world Solutions

Drinking Water Research Center

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Public Health is home to the Drinking Water Research Center. The mission of the Center is to coordinate research activities at UNC-CH pertaining to all aspects of drinking water, to explore new drinking water research initiatives, to provide technical assistance to potential users of this research, and to foster and facilitate collaboration with other engineers, scientists, and policymakers in other institutions and agencies in the United States and abroad to address critical drinking water issues.

The focus of research at the Drinking Water Research Center is on:

• the chemical, physical, and microbiological quality of drinking water;
• water purification technology;
• health effects associated with the consumption of drinking water; and
• economic and planning aspects related to the supply of safe drinking water.

Ongoing research activities within the DWRC include health effects of disinfection by-products, evaluation of disinfection performance, modeling distribution system networks, appropriate technologies for developing countries, and planning, decision-making, and risk assessment modeling.

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For more information, please contact Ramona DuBose either by telephone at 919-966-9467 or by e-mail at ramona_dubose@unc.edu.