On the face of it, Earth has plenty of the stuff. We live on a water world: about three quarters of the earth’s surface is submerged. And, give or take a few H2O molecules, there’s the same amount circulating through the water cycle now as there has been for thousands of years.
So why is there more and more talk about water scarcity?
99,7% is undrinkable
Of the world’s water, about 97% is salt water.
Of the 3% that is fresh water, most is locked up in ice caps and glaciers, or it’s sunk in the ground where it’s hard to get at.
All in all, less than 0,3% of the world’s water is available to us. Not just for drinking and sanitation of course – for agriculture, industry and energy production too.
And that 0,3% is shrinking all the time, as surface and ground water sources get polluted. Also, there are just more of us, every passing second. Watch world population grow.
1 in 6 people lack clean water
The UN has estimated that the minimum amount of clean, fresh water for a person’s basic daily needs (drinking, cooking and cleaning), is 20-50 litres. If you live in a context where you have clean piped water and a well-functioning sewage system, this is about the amount of water your household flushes down the toilet every day.
More than one in six people – 1.1 billion – don’t have access to this basic minimum. Two in five lack proper sanitation facilities. Every day, 3 800 children die from diseases associated with lack of safe drinking water and proper sanitation.
South Africa: one of the drylands
Water scarcity is most acute in the driest areas of the world – the drylands – home to over 2 billion people. Drylands include most countries in the Near East and North Africa, Mexico, Pakistan, large parts of China and India, and South Africa.
In this country, 12% of the population lack access to piped or well water and 35% lack proper sanitation.
This unacceptable state of affairs can be partly alleviated by improved infrastructure and stricter water use legislation. But there’s still only so much water, which means those of us for who can just turn on a tap have a practical, and moral, obligation.
Source: Health24
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