Have you ever heard the adage, “Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink”? It’s a vintage saying that is even more true today than it was when it was first written. The planet is made up of 70% water; however, even that’s not sufficient to sustain all of the life on the planet adequately. In fact, over 2 billion people worldwide don’t have access to the fresh water they need for drinking and sanitation, which number is likely to escalate to substantially more than 4 billion by the year 2050 unless we take more intense action to conquer the drinking water lack through emergency water treatment methods.

It might shock you to recognize that parts of the USA will be short of drinking water by as early as 2025. States like Arizona and California have already been feeling the pinch. Much of this lack may be blamed on the fact 85% of water within the U.S. is utilized in agriculture. Many people have had to undergo short intervals without water because of local problems, but it really has never bothered us too much, because we know the outage will soon be eliminated. However, some parts of this country are already forced to live with water rationing so they aren’t being allowed to water their grass or do other non-essential chores using water.

Nevertheless, what we feel in this country is nothing compared to the way it is in numerous other parts of the world. It’s estimated that a minimum of 80 countries now have critical shortages of water which creates a risk both for the health of the people as well as the economics of the country. Poverty is the single greatest problem with regards to these disadvantaged countries, since they lack the vital resources essential to cleanse their water resources and deliver them to individuals located there.

Many of the global conflicts between nations, including the one concerning Israel and Syria, are sparked by political battles over water rights. It’s hard to negotiate any kind of treaty in the event the nations taking part are battling over the rights to water within the same river which happens to pass through both countries. We already have more than a dozen nations receiving 75% of their water from rivers that flow through hostile countries upstream.

Inadequate water, coupled with rapidly-increasing populations, will present a lot of problems through the next century unless ways are found to combat the issue such as through municipal water filtration.

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Tags: fresh water, fresh water shortage, water purification, water shortage

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010 at 11:59 am and is filed under Massage Therapy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.