When you open your tap today and, as if by miracle (and thanks to a good deal of engineering), a stream of clean and drinkable water starts flowing, think of the millions of people for whom such basic access is not so simple.
Today is World Water Day.
Clean water, of course, is not just for drinking and hygiene. The United Nations estimates that up to 90 percent of the water humans use goes to growing food. And with a projected 9 billion people on this planet by the year 2050, even more clean water will have to go into food production.
Already, the problem of water scarcity and water pollution seems to touch almost every corner of the globe.
Earlier this year, my colleague Didi Kirsten Tatlow wrote about the dwindling water in China’s north. Gerry Mullany wrote about extreme water pollution in China’s cities. Others have written about the need to rebuild the United States’ water infrastructure.
Environmentalists have been lobbying multinationals to use water more sustainably.
Since the first World Water Day was celebrated twenty years ago, some progress has been made in ensuring access to water in many countries, UN-Water, the consortium of U.N. agencies and partners concerned with water issues, reported last year.
Still, by 2025, 1.8 billion of the word’s inhabitants will live in regions with absolute water scarcity, according to UN-Water.
Join the sustainability conversation. Do you think of clean water as a precious resource What do you do to ensure water is not wasted
