Monday, March 22nd is the United Nation's World Water Day - a day in which to focus attention on critical issues related to care and access of one of the few things we all truly need. This year's theme for World Water Day is "Clean Water for a Healthy World" and deals largely with the problems of providing potable water and hygienic sanitation to all the world's people.
Water scarcity is an easy problem to ignore in the industrialized world - yet it is one of the most underestimated resource issues facing the world today. Over the last half-century, world water demand has more than tripled, and water scarcity has grown so bad that in impoverished nations many rivers and lakes are literally running dry.
It is important to keep the population growth since 1950 in context - the number of human beings is estimated to have doubled in that time by the UN. Global demand for agriculture and aquatic sanitation systems have risen commensurately - 70 percent of global water withdrawals from sources of fresh water (lake, rivers, aquifers) is used for agriculture.
The total irrigated area used in farming has tripled since 1950 with the doubling of our population - currently, 60 percent of the world’s grain is grown in irrigated fields. This rapid rise in food access for the world's poorest is rapidly decelerating - from 1960 to 2000, the irrigated area of the world expanded by 2.1% annually on average. From 2001 to 2006, the average rate of increase was only 0.4%. The world population grows at 1.3% per year. If we don't return to increasing efficiencies in agriculture soon, the sustainable population will soon hit an unprecedented wall - and it will not be a limit found by calm and reasoned debate.
Most of the world's most important agricultural regions are withdrawing from their water tables faster than the water can be replenished. The aquifers under the North China Plain are used to produce nearly one third of China's grain; in India's breadbasket, the Punjab region; and in the U.S. southern Great Plains - all of these areas are depleting their aquifers.
Iran's 70 million people may soon be facing widespread water shortages. The dominant agricultural region is the Chenaran Plain, in the north-east. Wells drawing from the water table below the plain are used for irrigation and local water-supply, yet the latest official estimate shows the water table fell 25 feet in one year, 2001. Some villages have been evacuated because there is no longer any accessible water.
Foreign Policy has predicted that water security will be 'the next big thing', advising that water needs to be commoditized:
In some parts of the world, such as Oman, water is not free. Farmers must pay for the infrastructure or contribute work, and because water rights are tradable, water does have a price. Oman's system has been sustainable for 4,500 years. Obviously, pricing and tradability have their limits: We also need to guarantee enough water for drinking and basic hygiene for those unable to pay, and set aside quotas for nature.
Indeed, many of the problems we are barreling head-long towards are due to the tragedy of the commons, perhaps no incident being a more clear example of this than the way in which Somalia's completely unregulated waters have been disastrously overfished and used as a dumping ground by other nations.
Only 2.5% of the water on Earth is fresh water - and almost 2/3rds of that is locked in glaciers. While conservation is important in industrial nations where water use is enormous, many developing nations use very little more water than is necessary to sustain life. For them, we need to think about and press for funding to develop water access technologies. A desalination plant turns seawater into drinking water for $4-16 per thousand gallons (depending on salinity). The average German uses 50 gallons of water per day - that means to provide potable water from seawater desalination to the 3.6 million people per year who die due to water-related disease would cost $2.88 billion dollars per year by the highest estimate! In context, that is what we spend in Iraq in 200 hours (8.5 days).
In the end, the saddest statistic is this - water borne illness disproportionately affects children. Of those 3.6 million highly preventable deaths, 84% are among children.