The global water crisis

Richard Black on the BBC has a long, worthy piece: If you look at the numbers, it is hard to see how many East African communities made it through the long drought of 2005 and 2006. Among people who study human development, it is a widely-held view that each person needs about 20 litres of water each day for the basics - to drink, cook and wash sufficiently to avoid disease transmission.

Yet at the height of the East African drought, people were getting by on less than five litres a day - in some cases, less than one litre a day, enough for just three glasses of drinking water and nothing left over. The scarcity at the heart of the global water crisis is rooted in power, poverty and inequality.

Some people, perhaps incredibly from a western vantage point, are hardy enough to survive in these conditions; but it is not a recipe for a society that is healthy and developing enough to break out of poverty. "Obviously there are many drivers of human development," says the UN's Andrew Hudson. "But water is the most important."

….It is a tremendously complex picture; and forecasting its impacts makes simple climate modelling look a trivial task by comparison. Researchers at the University of Kassel in Germany, led by Martina Floerke, have attempted it. Their projections suggest that some regions are likely to see drastic declines in the amount of water available for personal use - and for intriguing reasons.

"The principal cause of decreasing water stress (where it occurs) is the greater availability of water due to increased annual precipitation related to climate change," they conclude. "The principal cause of increasing water stress is growing water withdrawals, and the most important factor for this increase is the growth of domestic water use stimulated by income growth."

The Sahara, shot by rossella piccinno, Wikimedia Commons, under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2