As we approach the 21st century, many countries face increasing shortages of freshwater. Even traditionally water-rich countries in Europe and North America are feeling the effects of past abuses of freshwater supplies, while in the water-poor countries of the inter-tropics, critical shortages are developing into incipient or actual crises.As a result, water resource managers are increasingly looking to the past, not in a spirit of nostalgia, but to blend technologies born out of a traditional need to conserve water with futuristic materials and techniques.The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has responded by drawing up a compendium of traditional and modern approaches to protecting, rehabilitating and harvesting freshwater sources. They include techniques for obtaining freshwater from saline water, waste-water and even fog, and draw on concepts and methods dating back to the earliest days of humankind.The series of books, a joint effort from UNEP’s International Environmental Technology Centre and Water Branch, is being published under the title, Alternative Technologies for Freshwater Augmentation. So far, UNEP has completed source books for five regions: Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Small Island Developing States (SIDS). A sixth volume for Western Asia is under way.The source books emphasize methodologies that work - old and new, engineered and non-engineered, high-tech and appropriate-tech. All have been tried and tested in the field, even if some of the alternative technologies are best described as ‘still experimental’. The authors supply contact names and addresses of agencies and individuals who are willing to discuss a range of technologies and traditions, many of which were abandoned more than 50 years ago in favour of highly engineered sources. Their practical experience demonstrates once again that old is not always worse.