THE WATER
CRISIS

Water makes up 71% of the Earth’s surface, which makes it hard to believe that we could ever run short. However, we are currently at the pinnacle of what could become a worldwide water crisis if we do not act accordingly. We take water for granted because seven out of every ten people in the world has access to running tap water in their homes. We have gained a false sense of security that we will always have access to water in our homes when just a few centuries ago, we did not have easy access like we do today. Even though we have a large amount of water on Earth, 97% of it is too salty to drink and 2% of it is frozen in the poles. That leave one percent of the water on Earth left to share between 7.5 billion people. The math is simple; the more people we have on Earth the less water we have. Usually, we rely on water from lakes and rivers to give us our supply. However, we have begun to use more and more groundwater because climate change has made the usually predictable replenishing of these sources more erratic and unreliable.

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It is not just our individual daily use of water that is putting us in this position, it is our entire lifestyle. Even though we required water as a drink to live, we also use it in almost everything we do. In fact, 70% of global water usage is by the agricultural and 19% is used by industry. It takes an immense amount of water to create products you use in your everyday life. For example, it takes 2,500 liters of water just to produce a cotton shirt and 15,000 to produce one kilogram of beef. The meat industry is one of the world’s highest contributors to the water crisis. Farmers need to grow alfalfa for their cattle which is commonly grown in desert areas. Since there is not enough water readily available in that area, they build irrigation systems, often wasting water by just flooding the fields.

 

Techniques like flooding fields and getting water from rivers miles away is very common in farming because we treat and price water like it will never run out. If we priced water at a higher value than it currently is, we might force people and companies to be more conservative with their water. However, this would put a large strain on those who are poor and can’t afford to pay more than they already do for water. Since so many underdeveloped countries have been fighting over access to water supply, many governments have considered trying to make more of it. This process called desalination, which is a treatment that makes salt water drinkable freshwater is still very expensive and takes a lot of energy to create. Without a cheaper and less environmentally costly way to desalinate water, this option will not be a viable one. We need to start thinking more wisely about how we use our water.