Water shortages a growing global concern

Sam Bond in edie.net: …David Nussbaum, chief executive of WWF UK, told delegates at the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) event in London this week that water scarcity is already the reality in many places and a serious risk to many of the challenges of the 21st century.

Meeting food and energy demands and avoiding regional conflict and wars all require a sustainable water supply, said Mt Nussbaum. "In more and more places we're simply using more water than nature provides for us," he said. "And in the end that will have to stop."

He said that Earth's land-to-sea ratio is deceptive and conceals the fact that fresh water is a resource for which demand outstrips supply. "We live on a blue planet covered in water but what we have access to, in terms of fresh drinking water, is less than one per cent of that water," he said. "Desalination can help a little in some place but it isn't going to make a material difference."…

A woman is filling a bowl with a dirty water at Boromata's well. The Vakaga region, close to Sudan, suffers from a high incidence of environmental diseases. Shot by ierre Holtz - UNICEF, hdptcar from Bangui, Central African Republic, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license