The reservoirs of the middle river stretch and due to the excessive water transfer result in a thorough and severe change along the course of the river. It turns into two complete different rivers with two different problems: upstream because of the reservoirs and the pollution and downstream due to the lack in water flow.

The current intensive livestock farming performed in the local area of Osona entails a disproportionate water consumption and generates a huge amount of manure that the farming soil is not able to absorb. In a few years time the rural culture has been substituted by labour force exploitation and the breeding cycle of pigs has been reduced to the half by means of feeding them with synthetic compound feed. The traditional organic manure is no longer produced and instead of it farm slurry is made, which pollutes the underground aquifers. Even if the conversion manufacture processes takes place, the recovery of these underground aquifers will take decades.

The water transfer started in the sixties but it has been in the last decade when the great abuses have taken place. From1996 till 2007 the 75% of the volume of flow of the river has been transferred even ignoring the legislation in force and the commitments of the administration. This situation has resulted in a severe economical social and ecological impact. In fact for the last four years, those days in which the failure in keeping the minimum volume of flow established in the Water Flow Maintenance Plan for the river Ter in Girona have been more than those in which it has been fulfilled.

This struggle was developed by the neighborhood movement in several neighborhoods in the metropolitan area of Barcelona. In its origins, he rose up against abusive tax increases in the water bill, some of which were not related to the water cycle.

In addition to the multiple demonstrations and protests, it emphasized the refusal to pay the part corresponding to those taxes on water bills.

The reflection of the movement itself during the conflict resulted in a proposed change in the tariff model aimed at ensuring an affordable cost for basic consumption and penalizing excessive consumption.
He also developed a culture of saving. At the moment, Barcelona is a city with lower water consumption than other large cities (110 liters per person per day).

The fight ended in a partial victory. The rates corresponding to the part of the service that is not privatized were consistent with civic demands (proof is split, weighting inhabitants per home), but the party itself depended AGBAR private enterprise was not touched.

The Spanish National Hidrological Plan (NHP) approved in the year 2000 had planned a water transfer of up to 1080 Hm3 from the river Ebro per year to the Mediterranean coast ( to the north of Spain up to Barcelona and to the south up to Almería) so as to cope with the growing water demands of the intensive irrigated land and the construction and real-estate development projects in the whole area as well. The environmental, economical and social impact arising from this water transfer led to a strong citizen opposition with the support of the scientific community, particularly in the Terres de l’ Ebre and the Aragonian Pyrenees -being the most affected areas.

This strong citizen opposition resulted in the derogation of the huge water transfer project in 2004, although more than 800 hydraulic infrastructures projects and other works comprised in the annex II of the NHP were not pulled out. Many of those projects are still nurturing non-sustainable expectations of new irrigation plans similar to the NHP, specifically in the river Ebro watershed – more than 300.000 hectares- which would require twice the volume of the flow of the river planned in the derogated water transfer of the Ebro.

Thus, despite the fact that the derogation of the huge water transfers was a success, we consider that the New Water Culture is not being enforced and the old water culture of unsustainable consumption is still prevailing, despite the water being a finite resource.

The desiccation of the Indus Delta is one of the world’s most underreported ecological disasters. A vast complex of massive dams, barrages, and irrigation canals has drastically reduced the flow of the Indus, causing seawater intrusion into the delta, contaminating drinking water and killing off vegetation and fish stocks.

The shrinking of the delta – by as much as 90% – has seriously harmed the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people.

In September 2004, after years of struggle, the Mazahuan women symbolically armed themselves with farming tools and wooden rifles and formed the Zapatista Army of Mazahua Women in Defense of Water. The Cutzamala System, with 40 km of canals, tunnels and siphons, today pumps 127 billion gallons per year to Mexico City and its 27 municipalities. Meanwhile, the Mazahua communities do not even have potable water.

An endless series of marches on Mexico City, hunger strikes, demonstrations and sit-ins, always dressed in their handsome clothing with their children at their side, made the Mazahuan women so popular that the Mexican government finally agreed to negotiate their demands: safe drinking water and a plan for comprehensive and sustainable development.

As mothers and as indigenous people, the Mazahuan women were able to link the women’s movement, the indigenous movement and the environmental movement in the struggle for the human right to drinking water.

The Brazilian Northeast is a semiarid region of 974,752 square km.  22 million people live in the region. Climate change is creating situations that could cause water shortages similar to the African Sahel. The Articulação no Semi-Árido (Articulation in the Semi-Arid Region, or ASA) is a network that brings together some 700 organizations, including farming unions, cooperatives, churches, rural worker federations, community associations, and NGOs, in order to foster development in the region.

The official approach to water management in the region has always been tied to large-scale projects, such as the huge water diversion project from the São Francisco. The government now intends to spend US$2 billion on a 700-km-long canal diverting water north from the São Francisco for the irrigation of large agro-export businesses, agro-fuels and shrimp. An enormous social movement has developed to oppose the water transfer project.

On the basis of recognizing access to safe water as a human right, the ASA Program promotes the One Million Cisterns Program, which seeks to deliver clean water to five million people. 190,330 cisterns have already been built in more than a thousand cities, and 187,923 families have been trained in water management.

The increased demand for water in Spain’s Mediterranean region is caused by growing demand for irrigation, often illegal water diversions, and rapid urbanization, much of it linked to tourism. In 1998, the National Hydrological Plan (PHN) was presented a solution for the growing water demand. Central to the plan was the diversion of water from the Ebro Basin to other water scarce areas. The environmental and social impacts of this diversion, coupled with economic irregularities, led to major resistance against the project, especially in Aragon and Catalonia, regions with serious water problems. This opposition was supported by the scientific community as well as the European Parliament.

In March 2004, the diversion plans were dropped and alternative solutions were applied. The Foundation for a New Water Culture believes that the best alternatives to diversions are water management policies that include new approaches to urban zoning, modernising inefficient water supply and irrigation networks, and applying new desalination technologies and the reuse of water.

Jánovas, a prosperous and beautiful village in the Ara Valley, near the Ordesa National Park (declared a protected area by UNESCO Man and the Biosphere programme), was one of 17 villages demolished in the 1960s to make way for a hydroelectric dam. Disagreements between the developer and the government, together with a poor project design and doubts about its profitability, delayed the project for decades, and eventually the dam was not built.

Almost half a century later, the people from the destroyed villages and their descendants are still fighting to get back their land and houses so they can reconstruct their lives in the places they still consider home.

The Klamath originates in marshes in eastern Oregon and descends through thickly forested canyons in the far north of California before flowing into the Pacific Ocean. The watershed is comparatively small  — the river is just over 400 km long. Yet it has earned a reputation as the most contentious basin in the US, pitting farmers and ranchers on one side against Native Americans and commercial fishermen on the other, all fighting over the river’s dwindling resources, in particular its once bountiful salmon runs. But the basin also holds hope for a stunning reconciliation.

In January 2008, many of the feuding parties reached an agreement that would allow the removal of four obsolescent, environmentally disastrous hydroelectric dams on the river, including two that would become the tallest dams ever taken down