It’s World Water Day today, 22 March, and the United Nations has marked the occassion by launching a new campaign to meet the globe’s growing thirst for the dwindling resource.

The "Water For Life Decade" aims to push governments and organizations to fulfill Millennium Development Goal targets of halving the number of people lacking access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015.

The World Economic Forum’s Water Initiative supports public-private partnerships that seek to address the urgent water needs. Just think: the UN estimates that 4,000 children die each day from water-borne diseases; 400 million youngsters lack even the bare minimum of safe water they need to live and  2.6 billion people worldwide do not have access to basic sanitation.

Statistics like these make for sobering reading…

UPDATE: The Water Initiative has released the first edition of its quarterly newsletter.