Visitors Now:
Total Visits:
Total Stories:

By Anonymous (Reporter)
Contributor profile | More stories

Story Views
Now:
Last Hour:
Last 24 Hours:
Total:

Win A Trip To Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week: Write A Blog Post About Water-Energy Nexus

Wednesday, December 19, 2012 13:52

% of readers think this story is Fact. Add your two cents.

(Before It's News)

Here’s a pretty big opportunity some of you might be interested in: the chance to be invited to Abu Dhabi as VIP media in order to cover the Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week, which is January 13-17. (This is a big event: the organizers expect 30,000 people from 150 countries to attend Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week.)

In particular, Masdar writes that the winner “will be selected for an all-expense paid trip to Abu Dhabi (January 13-17) and hired as Masdar’s VIP blogger for the week, posting regular updates throughout Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week, and receiving a modest stipend for their efforts.” Sounds pretty good, eh?

How To Enter

Eligibility to enter the blogging contest is a piece of cake: just be at least 18 years old. (Yeah, I know, you don’t have much control over that, but I know that the large majority of you do meet that requirement.)

The topic of the blogging contest is a big one (and quite an underrated one, in my humble opinion): the connection between energy and water, and solving increasingly important issues regarding both. The exact question bloggers are asked to address is: “What steps can individuals, businesses or world leaders take to address the most pressing and often interrelated water and energy challenges?”

Your entry for the “Engage: The Water-Energy Nexus” blogging contest must be 400-600 words. In your entry, you also have to be sure to mention the contest and link to www.masdar.ae/engage.

Once your blog post is published, submit the link in a comment on the contest page. (Do this by December 31, 2012.)

If your post meets all required criteria, it will be featured on the Masdar Engage page, where it can be voted on by you, your friends, your family, and others. Voting closes January 3, 2013.

If you don’t happen to have a website/blog to post on, we might be up for posting your entry as a guest post on CleanTechnica, or you can simply email it to to: [email protected] (drop me a note via our site contact form if you’re interested in the first option).

Full contest rules can be found here.

Selecting The Winner

The winner will be selected by a panel of judges based on quality of the work and social media shares (e.g. facebook likes, tweets, etc).

The winning entry will be featured on the Masdar website, and the winner will be notified by email.

Some Stimulation

As a bit of intellectual stimulation, here are some interesting water and energy facts shared by the folks over at Masdar:

The water-energy nexus is the relationship between how much water is used to generate and transmit energy, and how much energy it takes to collect, clean, move, store, and dispose of water.
40% of the world’s population is expected to live in water-scarce regions by 2025.
27% of the urban population in the developing world does not have piped water in its house.
Globally, we use 70% of our water sources for agriculture and irrigation, and only 10% on domestic uses.
Total electricity consumption of the water and wastewater sectors will grow 33% in the next 20 years.
99.7% of all the water on earth is not available for human and animal consumption.
52% of total global water desalination occurs in the Middle East.

Enter, Seriously!

Many people I know suffer from the “I’m not good enough” syndrome. If nobody ever refrained from trying something due to that feeling, I can’t even imagine how much better this world would be. I know many of you are highly informed on energy, climate, and water issues. And I also know that many of you will nonetheless say to yourself that you haven’t got a chance of winning, and that could be a huge impediment to you deciding to enter. My sincere advice is that you ignore that voice and enter the contest (if you’ve read this far, my guess is that you know enough about the issues to submit an entry). So, assuming that you will now enter, good luck to you! (And let us know if you win. )