Water, water everywhere; nor any drop to drink? (part 2) (Centre for Energy Studies Conference)

Cambridge Centre for Energy Studies It's the resource that we take most for granted when we have access to it, yet it is also the resource that challenges the world most in terms of wide variations in whether we have too much or too little of it. Water is a basic necessity of life, or as some are now saying a basic human rights issue, yet world leaders are only just getting to grips with the true magnitude of the crisis now facing the globe in terms of climate change and its variability on water resources. Africa, with its 53 countries and 1 billion people is the world's second-largest and most populated continent, and it is here that the vastly different impacts of climate change are now being felt from floods to droughts and famine. "The Global Water Initiative: Implications of Climate Change and Variability on African Water Resources", a three day conference co-ordinated by Cambridge Judge Business School's Cambridge Centre for Energy Studies and held at Downing College, University of Cambridge, brought together academics from all over the World to openly debate these truly daunting questions of environmental sustainability in the face of climate change.