It is well known that there will be water scarcity in the future. But do we really understand the magnitude of the problem on hand ? How far into the future are we talking about ? How many people will get affected by this ? A look into the numbers and the projections are outright disastrous. To make matters worse, the countries which are affected the most are all developing/under-developing. As a result, there are hardly any attempt to This is an attempt to make people aware of the truly devastating future we are heading into and what we all can do today in order to leave this planet in a better place for the next generation.
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Roughly 3/4th of Earth's surface is made up of water. The circles to the right represent all the water of Earth.
But of those, onle 3% is fresh water. The rest 97% is saline and unfit for human use.
Little less than 3% is hard to access leaving us with only 0.01% of all the water which is both fresh and easily accessible.
The water that supports all of humanity is contained within just 1/10 th of one circle shown on the right.
While the total usable water has remained the same, the world population on the other hand has exploded over the last few centuries.
In 10,000 BC, there were only 4 million humans on Earth. Today we are over 7 billion of us. Scroll down to see how explosive the growth was.
The world population is estimated to reach close to 11 billion in the year 2100.
The circles on the right represent all the people on Earth today. Scroll down to see how many people get affected by lack of safe water.
340000 children under five die every year from diarrhoeal diseases.
892 million still practice open defecation.
2.1 billion people lack access to safely managed drinking water services.
4.5 billion people lack safely managed sanitation services.
Using an ensemble of climate models and socioeconomic scenarios, WRI (World Resources Institute) scored and ranked future water stress in 167 countries by 2030.
The water stress scores for different countries in 2030 are shown on the right.
14 of the 33 likely most water stressed countries in 2040 are in the Middle East.
Global superpowers such as the United States, China and India face water risks of their own. High water stress in all three countries are projected to remain roughly constant through 2040.
Yet one country stands out in particular when it comes to water scarcity. 18 percent of the world's population resides in India but India has access to only 4 percent of usable water sources.
With over a billion people and high water scarcity score, India will be at epicentre of the water scarcity risk in the future. We now turn our focus on the dire situation in India.
At the end of 2018, India's population stands at over 1.36 billion
163 M people in India lack access to safe water. 600,000 children under five in India die each year, largely because of inadequate water supply and poor sanitation.
524 million people or 40% of the India's population practice open defecation. 58% of the total population lives on less than US $3.10 per day.
India’s agricultural sector accounts for over 80 percent of total water drawn.
Agriculture and allied sectors contributes upto 60% of India's population.
Yet it contributes only 13.7% of India's Gross Domestic Product.
At 157.3 million hectares, India holds the world’s second largest agricultural land area.
As much as 79.5% of India's farmland relies on flooding during monsoon season, so inadequate rainfall can cause droughts, making crop failure more common.
In 2016, a whopping 300 districts (or nearly half of India’s 640 districts) were under the spell of an acute drinking water shortage across India.
An average American golf course uses about 300,000 gallons per day. That is, each course each day consumes as much water as an American family of four uses in one year.
It takes 140 liters (35 gallons) of water to make just one cup of coffee, 1,000 liters (270 gallons) to make one liter of milk, and 16,000 liters (4200 gallons) to make one pound of beef.
In the time it took you to read this,
While we take these things for granted, it may not be so for our future generations.
