Happy World Water Day, everyone!
Worldvision Australia has partnered with Chatime Australia today for World Water Day. 10% of all hot and iced teas purchased on 22 March 2014 will go towards transforming the lives of children, families, and entire communities through the precious gift of water. Now thats refreshing! 🙂 
Read more here.
The United Nations World Water Day is celebrated annually on the 22nd of March – thats only 5 days away! Every year brings a different theme to raise awareness of issues relating to our most precious resource and this year’s theme is “Water and Energy”.
Water and energy are closely interlinked and interdependent. Energy generation and transmission requires utilization of water resources, particularly for hydroelectric, nuclear, and thermal energy sources. Conversely, about 8% of the global energy generation is used for pumping, treating and transporting water to various consumers.
In 2014, the UN System – working closely with its Member States and other relevant stakeholders – is collectively bringing its attention to the water-energy nexus, particularly addressing inequities, especially for the ‘bottom billion’ who live in slums and impoverished rural areas and survive without access to safe drinking water, adequate sanitation, sufficient food and energy services. It also aims to facilitate the development of policies and crosscutting frameworks that bridge ministries and sectors, leading the way to energy security and sustainable water use in a green economy. Particular attention will be paid to identifying best practices that can make a water- and energy-efficient ‘Green Industry’ a reality.
UN Water, 2014
I tried to see if there were any events happening in Sydney but the search has thus far proved to be elusive as the main event is occurring in Tokyo, Japan. Nonetheless, you can host your own event with the UN providing lots of free resources including posters, fact sheets, and even T-shirt templates.
You can find out more at the UN and the UN Water website. In the meantime, savewater is promising the chance to win a plethora of stuff, including an Apple iPad, for survey fill-ins (they are pretty short).
Yesterday was apparently Pi Day – or so Ant says!
And what my mother meant when she said you can’t eat beauty was that you can’t rely on how you look to sustain you. What is fundamentally beautiful is compassion for yourself and for those around you. That kind of beauty enflames the heart and enchants the soul.
Lupita Nyong’o
A new app I’ve discovered on the Google Play store is “Weekly Planner” by What App! – it’s everything I’ve been looking for in a simple and clean UI. It’s a little like the stock alarm layout with it’s simplicity, but the beauty is that you can set reminders for things you do regularly (which clears a lot of space in your mind). Things that you don’t really want to have to remember week to week, or things that do you want to remember and be consistent in doing. I’ve used it mostly for reminders of my weekly chore roster, so I can free up the mental space I would have used to focus on making my routines more efficient rather than trying to remember what day I had last done something.
It’s extremely useful to prompt you with the things that work on a semi regular basis. The app allows you to choose the repetition of days and the times you want to be reminded of the task. I’ve yet to find something that works in this way, previously I had dabbled with setting up a timetable for repetitive week to week reminders but nothing had suited the purpose like I had hoped. If you combine this with a good calendar app and a to do list you should have most of your organising needs taken care of relatively well. I currently use this in conjunction with Agenda Widget, GTasks and for one off random things tasks and Wunderlist to remember any lists of things I need to achieve or do for those events/tasks. Between these 4 apps I find all my organisational needs are met, they are also all free and have minimal permission intrusions or ads.
Weekly planner is a new app in the Play store and was last updated on February 28th 2014. It’s currently sitting with between 50-100 downloads, but definitely looks to be promising. A screen shot below from the developers shows an extremely clean layout. It’s nice and simple to set up.
If you’re looking for something that will give you notifications on your android drop down bar, this is a great option to try. It’s completely free, there are no ads and the permissions looked fairly reasonable from what I could find out about them.
Try it and see what you think!
Who says sustainability can’t be tasty?
So we’ve been dormant for a little while and it seems every year about this time we come back – for an annual post! This year though we’ll be coming back for regular posts!
As you might have seen from our previous post, we’re passionate about seeing social concerns being elevated in the mass consciousness and today we wanted to highlight this very simple challenge – so you too can be a part of something novel and probably hard for those of us in societies where owning a smartphone seems like a right and not a privilege.
All you need to do is not touch your phone for 10mins and you earn someone 1 days worth of water through the UNICEF sponsor (Giorgio Armani – Aqua for Life). It is really that simple and to be honest, it’s probably a really great thing to do for your own mindfulness and respite from being connected 24/7 (something else I’ve been thinking about lately).
Some of the facts
“Across the globe, every day, 1,400 children die from diseases directly linked to unsafe water or a lack of basic sanitation facilities.”
“768 million people do not have access to safe, clean drinking water, and 2.5 billion people live without proper sanitation.”
I’ve read a few things that indicate you could probably go without food for at least a week and depending on your health and fitness probably closer to 20-40 days without dying, but just 3 days without water and you would die…pretty remarkable how essential clean water is to surviving. What’s sad is that clean water is relatively cheap to attain through basic purification methods. Yet so many communities don’t have access to these basic human right facilities, which lead to so many other issues such as cholera, diarrhoeal diseases (one of the leading killers in under 5 year olds in developing countries) and chronic disability (reducing productivity). These contribute to the cycle of poverty, through mortality and morbidity.
I noticed one of the info messages while the challenge was running on my phone – the record for New South Wales was only 1 hour! I think that should be fairly easy to break, so I’m going for at least 60 mins now! It’s already half way through, but I challenge anyone else to break that too.
Ant and Owl 