By Xuefei Chen Axelsson
STOCKHOLM, Sept. 1 (Xinhua) -- Water quality should be on the spotlight and the focal point for discussion during this year's World Water Week from September 5th to 11th, said Anders Bertil, Executive Director of the Stockholm International Water Institute, SIWI.
"We haven't given enough emphasis to the quality of the resource. So that has been the sort of the orphan child of international water discussions. And I think that it's really time that we put the spotlight on the water quality challenge," Bertil said in an exclusive interview with Xinhua recently.
It is expected that about 2,400 people from around the world will participate in the water week. It will be a mixture of people -- government representatives, business people, scientists and people from non-governmental organizations to discuss water problems with different backgrounds and different experiences.
There will be three main areas in water quality to be discussed.
"The first one is all the water born diseases, that still is a big problem in many parts of the world. Cholera is one of them, but there are also many others. And the root cause behind the water-born diseases is to a large extend, the lack of adequate sanitation because with the spreading of waste from humans, it becomes a problem when diseases are spread into the water resources that people eventually drink," Bertil told Xinhua.
The wide spread use of chemicals in the society and households in both developing and industrialized countries is the second area to be discussed, especially in agriculture where there is also a lot of use of chemicals spreading in the environment in large areas.
"And the third area we will discuss is also the fact that many manufacturing industries now have moved from the western world to developing countries. And with that move of the manufacturing industry, the environmental problems have also moved," Bertil said the emissions of pollutants from many industries that earlier took place in countries like Sweden and in Europe and North America have now moved to many developing countries.
