Conserving aquatic ecosystems: revealing the secrets of plant species
Summary
Everyone agrees that water is a vital resource and a precious common good; no priority can take precedence over access to water. Water has been called "blue gold". Yet water insecurity is as serious a crisis as climate change. Over the last hundred years, global water use has increased sixfold due to demographic pressure, economic development and overconsumption. Increasingly scarce, this blue gold is also increasingly polluted, and thus finds itself at the heart of a disruption of aquatic ecosystems that have been providing natural water quality treatment for millennia.
Developing new approaches to protecting water resources, preserving aquatic ecosystems, preventing sources of pollution and treating polluted water upstream by implementing innovative treatment processes using sustainable technologies has become a priority. Are there solutions that are natural, sustainable, eco-responsible, economically viable and designed for the long term? Recent ecological solutions will be presented.
These solutions must not obscure the essential point, so aptly described by our guest of the day: water comes from nature, which is why "preserving the natural environment is necessarily the best way of preserving the resource" (E. Orsenna, L'Avenir de l'eau, Fayard, 2008).
This course will be followed by a seminar by Erik Orsenna, writer and member of the Académie Française, on the theme of "Hydrodiplomacy".