GLOBAL WATER CRISIS

IT’S TIME TO GET SERIOUS OVER WATER…

Water is a natural resources that most, if not all living beings, on this planet need. While the world's population tripled, the use of renewable water resources has grown six-fold. Within the next fifty years, the world population will increase by another 40 to 50%. This population growth - coupled with industrialization and urbanization - will result in an increasing demand for water and will have serious consequences on the environment.

The root cause of any conflict is the scarcity of the resource and dialogue is necessary and based more on ‘need’ rather than ‘rights’. 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 Nationas every day 4,400 children under the age of 5 die around the world, having fallen sick because of unclean water and sanitation.

The total amount of water available on earth has been estimated at 1.4 billion cubic kilometers, enough to cover the planet with a layer of about3-km deep. About 95% of the earth’s water is in the oceans, which is unfit for human consumption and other use because of its high salt content; about 4% is locked in the polar ice caps; and the remaining 1% constitutes all the fresh water in hydrological cycle including ground water reserves. Only 0.1% is available inas fresh water in rivers, lakes, and streams, which is suitable for human consumption. This highlights the significance of the need to preserve our fresh water resources.

Wars of the future will be fought over water as they are over oil today as our Blue Gold, the source of human survival, enters the global marketplace and political arena.

Water scarcity, and potential conflicts arising from it, is linked to larger issues of population growth, increasing food prices and global warming. Dealing with these pressures will require improved technologies, political will and new ideas about ho humans view their relations with the substance that sustains life.

So far most governments have agreed that life is a basic human right, and since we can't live without water, it follows that water is a basic human right, along with food and shelter. Access to good quality water and sanitation is a basic right for all human beings and plays an essential role in life and livelihoods, the preservation of the health of the population and the fight against poverty. Water is a public good and should therefore be under public control, even when its services are delegated partly or totally to the private sector.

In view of water wars going on in most of the countries, World Water Vision Report is right to say, “There is a water crisis today. But the crisis is not about having too little water to satisfy our needs. It is a crisis of managing water so badly that billions of people and the environment suffer badly” and there is a need to ratify International Water Courses adopted in 1997.

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