The Problem Of Drinking Water

When the question is asked “what is the biggest problem in the world”, to many the first that comes to mind is possibly war, education, or even climate change. But unshockingly, the revelation is that the world’s biggest problem at this moment is neither war, nuclear warfare, or even the supposed apocalypse brought about by global warming. According to the European Union, it’s the lack of drinking water. But with all the propaganda raising awareness of the issue, why is this still a problem? Celebrities and organizations around the world pool together millions of dollars into these projects every year yet, somehow every 29 seconds a child somewhere is dying due to contaminated water. A younger charity, known simply as Charity:Water, uses 100% of funds donated toward water related projects has raised over $155 million dollars in only the past two years. This begs the question, what are the causes of this lack of drinking water?

The key word is “drinking” water, while the world is made of 71% water, not all of it is suitable “drinking” water. For water to be considered drinkable, it must be devoid of all harmful agents and be safe to not only drink, but also prepare food with as well. That water only makes up 3% of the world’s water. In addition to that only 1% of the world’s water is available to us because the other 2% is frozen in glaciers. To make matters worse, we even pollute the water we have available to us. After the industrial revolution, the human race lost the connection with the environment and broke the balance between maintaining the planet and developing technology. Water pollution doesn’t reduce the amount of water in the world, but rather reduces it efficiency. Water is still being cleaned and processed into drink...

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...can survive for about four weeks without food, an adult can’t survive more than a week without fresh water. With the world’s growing population, the water scarcity problem becomes more evident. The other more obvious problems of the world stem from the water scarcity issue. When small wars are fought over natural resources and pollution is creating a lack of drinking water, it makes it evident that by solving the problem of water scarcity, many of the other world problems will be solved as well. By efficiently managing the world’s available freshwater, population growth can be delayed so that measures can be put in place to reduce the world’s population naturally through methods like birth control. By solving the problem of water scarcity, the diverse population of freshwater species can be preserved. The water crisis may be possible, but it is far from inevitable.