Tools to Communicate Urgency to Diminish Social Impacts on Water and Land

Abstract

Impacts on water land and natural resources from distinctive consumption and production patterns were assessed by using several water
and ecological footprint techniques. Typical consequences and comparison graphs of social groups from several countries were obtained. These
figures provide a comparison basis to orientate public policies and priorities for environmental and water education strategies and programs.
"New water culture" is a recent term which denotes a much needed cultural shift towards more respectful and
concrete actions which seek real sustainability, contrary the usual merely rhetorical sustainability. One of its
main points is to hold back long "haulings" of real and virtual water; that is, reduce or eliminate unnecessary
water transfers among river basins and long and environmental inconvenient commercial shipping of its derived
commercial and industrial produces. Nowadays the general global situation is of overshoot, unsustainability and
anthropogenic climate alterations, so an important assessment is to compare if accumulative voluntary
reductions (probable) on individual consumptions and production patterns, could be stronger and higher than
the demographic and ideological pushes on the contrary sense. That will give a better idea of the feasibility of
having any important success, or which other measures besides appealing to voluntary measures, ought to be
implemented.