Vacuum-Enhanced Recovery Project At The Site Of Former Military Airbase Rumbula In Riga, Latvia

Throughout history water has confronted humanity with some of its greatest challenges. Water is a source of life and a natural resource that sustains our environments and supports livelihoods – but it is also a source of risk and vulnerability. In the early twenty-first century, prospects for human development are threatened by a deepening global water crisis. According to the Human Development Report 2006, more than 1 billion people are denied the right to clean water. These headline numbers capture only one dimension of the problem. Every year some 1.8 million children die as a result of diarrhoea and other diseases caused by unclean water and poor sanitation. At the start of the twenty-first century unclean water is the world’s second biggest killer of children.

According to the UN Millennium Ecological Assessment, water-b ased ecosystems are now the world’s most degraded natural resource; an outcome that can be traced to the breaching of ecological boundaries. Both drinking water quantity and quality are reduced by human operation. In many of the most stressed water basins quality has been impacted by different kind of pollution.