With the world population touching 7 billion , the demand and availability of water has become a critical issue for all countries. This has even greater relevance in our region as we have very limited fresh water resources. In our country , desalination of water is the main method of obtaining potable drinking water . To address this critical issue , Emirates Environmental Group(EEG ) organized a community lecture last evening , aptly titled ?Every Drop Matters?.

For several years now , I have been an active member of EEG and these community lectures are a great way of spreading awareness and building participation of civil society in such matters.

The speaker was Sarfraz H. Dairkee who is an expert on the subject and also a founding board member of the Emirates Green Building Council and also heads the Technical Sub Committee of Water Efficiency. It was quite an eyeopener for us in the audience to learn that less than 1% of the world?s water resources are actually fresh and renewable.

He spoke on concepts such as ? Carbon footprint of water ? which is quite relevant to our regions where we spend a lot of energy to generate fresh water. A key ingredient of water conservation involves knowledge about the water footprint of the products we use. Water footprint of a product is indicative of the volume of fresh water used to produce the product . These are new concepts and we , as ambassadors , play an important role in spreading awareness about this in our societies.