Solutions

submitted by Stuart Leiderman

A woman outside her newly built latrine.  Photo: Lynn Maung/IRIN

YAE OO, 4 May 2012 (IRIN) - The Burmese government declared three villages in western Bago Division open defecation free (ODF), a first in Myanmar, following the first year of a community-led total sanitation (CLTS) effort launched by the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the Ministry of Health.

"This is a major step forward. It proves that communities can discard the practice of open defecation and build latrines on their own initiative," Ramesh Shrestha, the UNICEF country representative in Myanmar, told IRIN.

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

Myanmar - Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) - http://www.communityledtotalsanitation.org/country/Myanmar

WHO / UNICEF - Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation - Estimates for the use of Improved Sanitation Facilities - Updated March 2012 - Myanmar (10 page .PDF file)

submitted by Samuel Bendett

Homeland Security News Wire - April 18, 2012

The use of a more streamlined process to recycle wastewater could have saved Brisbane from severe flooding in 2011 and mitigated recent flood risks in NSW, a leading water expert says

Direct potable reuse (DPR) of wastewater could free up billions of liters of water from reservoirs around Australia, giving cities a greater buffer to capture rainwater and control major flooding events, says Dr. Stuart Khan, an environmental engineer at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Water Research Center.

Current plans for water recycling in Australia generally involve Indirect Potable Reuse (IPR), in which reclaimed water is treated to a high standard and then returned to rivers, lakes and aquifers, where it mixes with environmental waters before being re-extracted for further treatment.

STUTTGART, Germany - Nancy Lindborg, assistant administrator for USAID's Bureau of Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance (DCHA), addresses staff of U.S. Africa Command, March 30, 2012, as part of the Command Speaker Series. Lindborg talked about USAID's efforts in Africa and discussed how U.S. AFRICOM can better work with the interagency organization to achieve common objectives. (U.S. AFRICOM photo by Danielle Skinner)

submitted by Samuel Bendett

U.S. AFRICOM Public Affairs - by Danielle Skinner

STUTTGART, Germany, Apr 3, 2012 — In developing countries experiencing chronic crises, such as those in the Horn of Africa, disaster risk reduction is often just as important, if not more so, than humanitarian response and recovery, according to a senior official from U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).