Water - a 'life and death' matter
Water is precious because life could not exist without it. Life was born as a result of water, from plants to animals to humans. Despite Earth’s appearance of watery abundance, less than one percent of the water on Earth is actually fresh and usable. Nature’s water-recycling process, known as the water cycle, has kept the amount of water on Earth about the same for millions of years.
If we do not change the way we use water, the amount needed for a rapidly growing world population will double in the next 50 years.
All living things depend on water for survival. Plants need water to make food and grow. Many animals and plants live in water. People need water for cooking, bathing, transportation, recreation, and for growing crops and making products. Without water, there would be no food to eat, no clothes to wear, and no toys to play with. In fact, our bodies are all made of water.
Without water, we wouldn’t exist!
Please click here to see a picture showing how much of planet Earth is made of water. You will see that it is very little, actually.
The world’s water crisis has many faces. A girl in Africa walks three miles before school to fetch water from a distant well. A teenage boy in China is afflicted with terrible skin lesions because his village well is contaminated with arsenic.
Impoverished slum dwellers in Angola draw drinking water from the local river where their sewage is dumped. Farmers on the lower reaches of the Colorado River struggle because water has been diverted to cities like Las Vegas and Los Angeles.
According to the United Nations, every day 4,400 children under the age of 5 die around the world, having fallen sick because of unclean water and sanitation. In fact, five times as many children die each year of diarrhea as of HIV/AIDS. A third of the world’s population is enduring some form of water scarcity. One in every six human beings has no access to clean water within a kilometer of their homes. Half of all people in developing countries have no access to proper sanitation. Water is critical for life and for livelihoods. Yet billions of people suffer from disease, poverty and a lack of dignity and opportunity because they have no access to this basic resource.
Why is this so?
Access to water is mainly a crisis for the poor. More than two-thirds of those without clean water survive on less than $2 a day. Either poor people are excluded because of a lack of legal rights to claim adequate water, or they fall outside the scope of limited water infrastructure that serves largely the rich.
The problem of water provision severely affects slums and shantytowns. Over the next few years a majority of the world’s population will live in cities — for the first time in human history. In large parts of Africa, more than 60 percent of city dwellers are in fact slum dwellers. For many of them, water comes not from faucets inside their shacks but from water tankers or standpipes, neither of which is reliable as a water source. Open sewers increase the risk of water-borne diseases.
Water is also a crisis for women and children, because they bear the burden of collecting water. In some places, women have to walk nearly 10 kilometers to reach a water source. Girls drop out of school either because they have to help fetch water or because there aren’t adequate sanitary facilities in school toilets. Millions of school days are lost as a result.
Water scarcity affects some parts of the world more than others. Today, 800 million people live under a threshold of “water stress.” As rivers dry up, lakes shrink and groundwater reserves get depleted, that figure will rise to 3 billion in 2025, especially in parts of Asia and Africa. There is an urgent need to reduce waste and invest in infrastructure to “harvest” rainwater or increase storage.
Most water use is in agriculture. Farming uses up to 70 times more water than is used for cooking and washing. Many countries have to import more than half their food needs because they do not have enough water to grow more food. If we do not change the way we use water, the amount needed for a rapidly growing world population will double in the next 50 years.
But the water crisis hits cities in the rich world as well — Houston and Sydney, for example, are using more water than is replenished. Australia is the world’s driest continent, where increasing salinity in water is threatening agriculture. Large parts of Europe are affected by recurring droughts.
Global warming is another threat. It will be responsible for declining rainfall in some regions, glacial melt in others, and rising sea levels. Other natural disasters occur with more sudden intensity. The floods that affect the Yangtze River in China every year, the hurricane that devastated New Orleans or the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean that killed more than 200,000 people are all examples of the threats that natural events continue to pose for millions around the world.
Water is ultimately a shared resource. Two-fifths of humanity lives in river and lake basins that lie within two or more countries. Tied together in a web of interdependence, these societies can either suffer from increasing political conflicts or benefit from cooperation. Shared management of river basins has the potential for yielding large benefits in terms of the quantity, quality and predictability of water flows.
The United Nations declared has 2005-2015 as the ‘Water for Life’ decade. The goal is to reduce by half the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water by 2015 and to stop unsustainable exploitation of water resources. Governments pledged to do this when they adopted the Millennium Development Goals in 2000.
Meat consumption and water usage
Many times more water is needed for the production of meat and other animal products, such as eggs and dairy produce, than for the production of plant products.
The University of Twente (The Netherlands) has for the first time (January 2011) calculated the exact water footprint of both animal and plant products per kilo, per calorie and per protein. Among the results of the calculations are that beef uses up twenty times more water per calorie than grain or potatoes.
In combination with the growing world population, this is putting pressure on the earth's freshwater resources: only three percent of all the water on earth is fresh, and only a small proportion of this is available for human use.
The Twente Water Centre, the University of Twente's centre of expertise in the area of water systems and governance, has developed a specialism in the calculation of the water footprint of products and production methods. Many companies make use of this expertise, out of cost considerations and because they are increasingly confronted with water shortages. For the first time, it has now been calculated how much fresh water is needed for the production of all common protein products.
- For a kilo of beef, for example, 15,000 litres are needed.
- Pork uses up 6,000 litres of water per kilo and chicken 4,300 litres.
- 4,000 litres of water are needed for a kilo of pulses, while a kilo of soya beans uses up 'just' 2,100 litres.
- Per gram of protein, meat has a water footprint that is 1.5 to 6 times larger than that for pulses.
There are also great differences between animal and plant products when the water use per calorie is calculated. Beef, for example, scores on average twenty times higher than grain or potatoes.
The key distinguishing factor between the various types of meat is the type and amount of feed that is needed to allow the animal to grow. For example, a cow has to eat much more to put on a kilo of flesh than a chicken or a pig does. According to Arjen Hoekstra, professor of Water Engineering & Management at the University of Twente, "what is known as feed conversion efficiency partly determines the water footprint. After all, all animal feed is produced with the use of water. Irrigation is therefore needed in large parts of the world because there is too little rainfall in general or in particular periods."
The location where the livestock is raised also determines the water footprint. Livestock that grazes outdoors uses up rainwater that is naturally present in grass, while livestock in industrialized animal production is given more feed, which originates from fields that sometimes have to be irrigated. The researchers from the University of Twente have therefore also taken into account the type of feed and its origin, which is sometimes in areas with a water shortage. The water demands of livestock breeding in the western world can therefore contribute to water shortages elsewhere. For example, a number of rivers in China are drying up before they reach the sea, partly because of the irrigation of agricultural land where animal feed is grown.
Johan van de Gronden, director of the WWF in the Netherlands, says:
"The figures say a lot about the often hidden consequences of our everyday consumption pattern for the natural world. We already knew that a low-meat diet is not only healthier, but also better for nature and the climate. Now we can also see that unbridled meat consumption contributes to water shortages in other parts of the world. We don't need to become vegetarians en masse to give nature a helping hand. Just one meat-free day per week already makes a world of difference."
Unsustainable water use
depleting the world's major aquifers
Dec. 22, 2012 (UPI) -- U.S. researchers say gravity-monitoring satellites have recorded drops in groundwater levels in many places across the globe during the past nine years.
Scientists at the University of California Center for Hydrologic Modeling in Irvine said water has been disappearing beneath southern Argentina, western Australia and stretches of the United States, ScienceNews.org reported.
The findings raise concerns farmers are pumping too much water out of the ground in dry regions, researchers said.
"Groundwater is being depleted at a rapid clip in virtually of all of the major aquifers in the world's arid and semiarid regions," hydrologist Jay Famiglietti said.
The drop is especially severe in parts of California, India, the Middle East and China, where expanding agriculture has increased water demand, the researchers said.
"People are using groundwater faster than it can be naturally recharged," Matthew Rodell, a hydrologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said.
Current water use in many areas has become unsustainable, another researcher said.
"There are too many areas in the world where groundwater development far exceeds a sustainable level," Leonard Konikow, a hydrogeologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, said. "Something will have to change."
