Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Coping with the world's water scarcity is “
the
challenge of the
twenty-fi rst century,” said Dr. Jacques Diouf, speaking at World
Water Day celebrations in March 2007 in Rome. He's director gen-
eral of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization
(FAO). The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Admini-
stration (NOAA), a U.S. government agency, describes the water
issue as an “alarming decline in water supplies in certain regions of
the United States and worldwide.”
Let's look at some of the global statistics.
Worldwide, 1.1 billion people don't have access to clean
drinking water. That's 17 percent of the global population
(World Health Organization, 2004).
1
Nearly 1.6 million people die annually because of unsafe
water supplies; 1.8 million people die annually from diar-
rheal diseases, including cholera, with 88 percent of those
deaths attributed to unsafe water supplies (World Health
Organization, 2002).
2
As many as 135 million people could die from water-related
diseases by 2020.
3
By 2050, 75 percent of the world's population could face
a freshwater scarcity, according to UNESCO.
4
Why should we in the United States, who live with access to
safe
water, care if parts of Africa or China don't have enough water, or
if Europe faces drought, or if tens of thousands of people deal with
polluted water every year? The answers aren't simple, and the issues
aren't confi ned to the other side of the world.
THE WORLD IS THE STAGE
No one can live without water. Humans can live without food for
up to a month or so, but can go without water for about a week at
most.
5
That's the bottom line.
Imagine living in a place where you drill a well to provide
your family with “safe” drinking water, only to discover that what
comes out of the ground makes you sick. That's what has hap-
pened to hundreds of thousands of people in Bangladesh and
