Water use rising faster than world population

[Lite]

Like oil in the 20th century, water could well be the essential commodity on which the 21st century will turn.

Human beings have depended on access to water since the earliest days of civilization, but with 7 billion people on the planet as of October 31, exponentially expanding urbanization and development are driving demand like never before.

Water use has been growing at more than twice the rate of population increase in the last century, said Kirsty Jenkinson of the World Resources Institute, a Washington think tank.

Water use is predicted to increase by 50 percent between 2007 and 2025 in developing countries and 18 percent in developed ones, with much of the increased use in the poorest countries with more and more people moving from rural areas to cities, Jenkinson said in a telephone interview.

Factor in the expected impacts of climate change this century -- more severe floods, droughts and shifts from past precipitation patterns -- that are likely to hit the poorest people first and worst "and we have a significant challenge on our hands," Jenkinson said.

Will there be enough water for everyone, especially if population continues to rise, as predicted, to 9 billion by mid-century?

"There's a lot of water on Earth, so we probably won't run out," said Rob Renner, executive director of the Colorado-based Water Research Foundation.

"The problem is that 97.5 percent of it is salty and ... of the 2.5 percent that's fresh, two-thirds of that is frozen. So there's not a lot of fresh water to deal with in the world."

Risk Spots

Over a billion people lack access to clean drinking water, and over 2 billion live without adequate sanitation, leading to the deaths of 5 million people, mostly children, each year from preventable waterborne disease, Renner said.

Only 8 percent of the planet's fresh water supply goes to domestic use and about 70 percent is used for irrigation and 22 percent in industry, Jenkinson said.

Droughts and insufficient rainfall contribute to what's known as water risk, along with floods and contamination.

Hot spots of water risk, as reported in the World Resources Institute's Aqueduct online atlas here, include:

* Australia's Murray-Darling basin;

* the Colorado River basin in the U.S. Southwest;

* the Orange-Senqu basin, covering parts of South Africa, Botswana and Namibia and all of Lesotho;

* and the Yangtze and Yellow river basins in China.

What is required, Jenkinson said, is integrated water resource management that takes into account who needs what kind of water, as well as where and how to use it most efficiently.

"Water is going to quickly become a limiting factor in our lifetimes," said Ralph Eberts, executive vice president of Black & Veatch, a $2.3 billion (1.4 billion pound) engineering business that designs water systems and operates in more than 100 countries.

He said he sees a "reprioritization" of resources to address the water challenges posed by changing climate and growing urbanization.

Eberts' company is not alone. Water scarcity and water stress -- which occurs when demand for water exceeds supply or when poor quality restricts use -- has already hit water-intensive companies and supply chains in Russia, China and across the southern United States.

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[Ambrocious]

What needs to be done here is not set a limit on the people to be able to drink water or use it, but readily develop and distribute solar generated water units which can turn ocean water into fresh water. The process happens when you gather and confine the salt water from the ocean and then you boil it. It turns into steam and then the steam raises up and is gathered into a separate tank where it is now fresh drinkable water.

On a much smaller scale of things, here is one way to do it: http://www.wikihow.c...-Drinking-Water

This is my guess on what these warnings are really about, and it is very disturbing to me. Water is an important factor in all life. By restricting it or creating new laws about water consumption, we then lose the ability to have a better life because we can't have the amount of water that we need. I believe the word used for what is happening to us (humanity VS the world elite) is known as full spectrum dominance. Since humanity is in a struggle, soon to be all out war for freedom and soon survival, it would seem logical to conclude that our governments will want to be on top of this matter. This is accomplished by full spectrum dominance. Being self sufficient is VITAL to survival.

Full-spectrum dominance is a military concept whereby a joint military structure achieves control over all elements of the battlespace using land, air, maritime and space based assets.

Full spectrum dominance includes the physical battlespace; air, surface and sub-surface as well as the electromagnetic spectrum and information space. Control implies that freedom of opposition force assets to exploit the battlespace is wholly constrained.

[T4C Fantasy]

the thing is it doesnt matter.. we will NEVER run out of water... unless the sun vaporizes it all we have the ability to reuse shit and piss water

[Veboy]

What needs to be done here is not set a limit on the people to be able to drink water or use it, but readily develop and distribute solar generated water units which can turn ocean water into fresh water. The process happens when you gather and confine the salt water from the ocean and then you boil it. It turns into steam and then the steam raises up and is gathered into a separate tank where it is now fresh drinkable water. On a much smaller scale of things, here is one way to do it: http://www.wikihow.c...-Drinking-Water

Turning Salt Water to Drinking Water may cost a lot of energy ... and when drinking water is not available naturally , governments will try to take water as much as they can, make it a crystal clear drinking water and start selling them to others with an extra cost ! after some time, war begins [ as we see for oil in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan or land at WWs ].

That's my guess.

[CODYQX4]

Yes the conversion uses lots of energy, but energy also depends on oil. We won't run out but people will be left to die so profit can skyrocket before oil finnaly dies and we use solar powered satellites, which would give us all the energy we need to desalinate water.

We as a species will find a way to survive, but a lot of people will die as the solution is delayed so profit can be made. We could be off oil in a decade easily if it were forced but there's no way in hell the oil companies would stand for that, not while they control the oil and it's still profitable. The idea is to bleed oil for all its worth, then use all that profit to enter the solar market. People used to throw out gasoline and only used kerosene, and once we found out kerosene couldn't sustain the energy use, we found out how to use gas.

Once desalination is cheap and energy is there to support it without costing an arm and leg, there's no chance in hell we'll ever run out of water, but the current energy system discourages looking into these kinds of things.