Global Drinking Water Scarcity

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“More than 3.4 million people die each year from contaminated water related causes. Nearly all deaths, 99 percent, occur in the developing world.” – World Health Organization (WHO). (2014). --

Our planet's immense population is depleting the supply of drinking water resources. How will this problem develop in the years to come. Will we be able to provide enough drinking water to satisfy all the world’s needs? What can we do about the present lack of clean drinking water in many underdeveloped countries all around the world? We must reevaluate our distribution of freshwater, the source of most drinking water, and find a way to preserve it for generations to come. An astounding one-half of the world’s population currently lives without an adequate supply of clean drinking water. Ten to twenty thousand children die everyday of preventable water related diseases, and the latest evidence shows that we are lagging in the effort to resolve these problems.

The average American cannot conceptualize daily life without a readily available supply of water for drinking, cooking, and bathing. Carrying water for miles and miles from a well just to boil a pot of water over a fire, and who is to say that the water is clean. One billion people suffer from lack of a clean water supply. Two and a half billion do not have adequate sanitation services in their homes or around them. Rivers and streams that may have once provided a water source have now been contaminated and are no longer useful for drinking or cooking with. Most of the time people are forced to drink brackish or arsenic contaminated water. Millions of people in Bangladesh and India drink water with arsenic in it everyday.

Other problems with water sanitation include disea...

... middle of paper ...

...venly distribute and how to control flow enough so that no one will be without necessary sanitation and drinking water that will just be the beginning. After that we must learn how to preserve our water, and find out how we can make it last . With a large population that continues to grow at a staggering rate we will have to learn, and learn fast. Water is the basis of life on this planet and we would not survive with out it. It is also one of the greatest mysteries on this planet. Although we know how it is naturally reused and recycled in the environment, we now have to factor ourselves into the equation. The greatest threat to our water resources is ourselves.

Works Consulted

Gleick, Peter. The World’s Water. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1998.

Homer-Dixon, Thomas. Environmental Scarcity and Global Security. New York: Foreign Policy Association, 1993.

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