The headline at number two, was a particular surprise. Now bare in mind, it was 06:30GMT and 07:30CET so a lot of Europe hadn't had much time to check it's news on the BBC yet, so it was being read by people from places like India, China and Australia. I already had the page open on another tab and immediately clicked through to it.
And was greeted by Peter Brabeck-Letmanthe, the Chairman of none other than Nestle! Well that was a shock for a start. A quick scan of the first few lines confirmed that yes this was indeed a World Water Day story, and that yes a World Water day story was trending second on the BBC news website, well immediately my interest was increased even further. For while we do indeed have some Nestle branded products on our shop shelves here in Finland, we don't get there chocolate products. And those, along with some of Nestle's recent actions in the field of Social Media related to their production of such have given Nestle's enemies in the environmental NGO's a field day and a mass of extra publicty! Most of which has passed by the mainstream media here in Finland. Those stories are the subject of another blog post so for now we will only say that Nestle are on the back foot in the press.
With the publication of this article however I think that Nestle, despite what you think or what people accuse them of, are not that blind to the problems around the world and that face us all with relation to water in the 21st century. After all they were not forced into joining the 2030 Water Resources Group back in 2008, but they saw themselves that it is in everyone's best interests that water scarcity be given some serious thought and discussion. The report that has been produced by the group and the scientists involved runs to a 198 pages and is called "Charting Our Water Future, Economic frameworks to inform decision making" and should be a must read for all of us!
So pile in and over the coming days let me know what you think. You can find the report here. The full report is a 5.3MB pdf format file.
Before I finish a personal message to all of those first year Environmental Engineering students of TAMK who are reading this. I hope that your first World Water Day in TAMK was a glowing success, I am sure it was!
Nice to see World Water Day popular in a big way on Twitter today http://bit.ly/bms1Sn
ReplyDeleteInteresting, Water Day was there and interesting lectures took place, I hope someone from the 1st year students could put pictures here or comment the lectures? :)
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