Water crisis/ worldwide major problems

Water crisis

Properties of water 

•  Colorless      
• Orderless
• Tasteless
• A universal solvent

Does water exist in pure form?

In nature, water does not exist in pure form due to the following major reasons:
• A universal solvent
• Dumping ground for wastes
• Decreased self-purification due to increased wastes and impurities

Water Pollution

Additions of any organic or inorganic substance which may alter the properties of water and render it unfit for a particular use and adversely affect living organisms.

Water Distribution on Earth

Earth is the blue planet there is no shortage of water we have 326 million trillion gallon of it. Always have, always will. Water may freeze into ice or evaporate into air but it doesn’t leave planet. If we suck up all water on earth, it would fit into this sphere, But 97% of it is salty and 2% is trapped in ice at the poles, so all of humankind relies on just 1% of that water to survive.

World Water Crisis

When people talk about running out of water, what they really mean is, do they have access to that very small percentage?  And answer is depends a lot on where you live, Kuwait is one of the poorest countries in term of water per capita, and Canada one of the richest doesn’t have twice as much or even ten times much. It has 10,000 times as much, but it also matters where the water is that 1% of earth’s water that we all rely on, most of it is underground and really difficult and expensive to get to, so human have mostly settled close to surface water, like rivers and lakes. Around 90% of the world’s population lives less than ten kilometers from a freshwater source.

Water Usage on Earth

How people on earth used water?

• Human need to drink almost a gallon of water per day

• Brushing your teeth

• Washing your hands typically uses about a gallon

• Three gallons in flushes. 

But the drinking, washing and toilet flushing of every person on earth only accounts for 8% of our freshwater use each year. Most of water goes to agriculture, industry and into food and product we use. 98% of water in 1 liter coca-cola bottle is actually embedded in all ingredients that were grown to make the bottles of coca-cola. 74% liters of water goes into every glass of beer, a cup of coffee 130 liters, each of your cotton shirts 2500 liters water used. Alfalfa is a common ingredient in cattle feed and growing a kilogram of it takes 510 liters of water. An avg. cow consumes about 12 kilograms of feed a day. There is not enough water in the world.  Just a fraction of water used South Africa’s wine industry would be enough for Cape Town’s taps.  India and china both grow their mist water intensive crops. In some of their driest regions, but as water gets scarcer that may change. 

  The bank Goldman sachs predicted: that water would be the petroleum for the next century.

Water Conflict around the World

Water scarcity is increasingly driving violent conflict around the world. India and Pakistan are set for water wars and Yemen is also tearing itself apart over Water.  Water scarcity is at heart of ongoing conflict in Darfur which, since 2003 has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. According to United Nations report the lack of fresh water is major conflict areas such as Syria, some analysts say Syrian civil war was caused in large part by severe drought in 2006. 

Desalination of Ocean Water

Desalination of ocean water has than double over the last decade but the amount we make a year still adds up the less than 1% of water we use. In 2010 the UN recognized access to water and sanitation as human right (recognizes the right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation as a human right that is essential for full of enjoyment of life and all human rights). 

                          

How does this crisis look worldwide?

According to study published in one in four of worlds big cities are water stress, in 2015 the situation in Brazil, Sao Paulo was so bad that police had to escort water trucks to avoid looting the city had less than twenty days’ worth of water. According to WHO 2.1 billion people lack safe drinking water.  ). Sydney water is pushing for a 15% hike over four years putting more pressure on family budgets. This drive for water conservation, water saving, is now a burden that poor people must carry. In 2017 Philadelphia started experimenting with tying water price to income

Solutions

▪ By putting a higher price on water might have benefited
▪ Would not be growing alfalfa in desert
▪ Would be growing crops that don’t make sense in really arid places because of it economics.
▪ Repair our water infrastructure.
▪ Marketing of water rights.
▪ Raising water prices.
▪ Wasting less water
▪ Decreasing government subsides for supplying water.
▪ Increasing government subsides for reducing water waste
▪ Slowing population growth

Causes of Water Crisis

➢ The main issue is that demand for all types of water for different uses particularly for agriculture, industrialization or urban development demand for water is sky-rocketing.

➢ The second problem is that water is not distributed evenly around the earth. 

➢ One critical result of this is that we have 42% leakages in the water network.

➢ Mexico City is facing an existential water crisis, loses half of its drinking water to leaky pipes.

➢ 95% of irrigated farmland in world, Probably wouldn’t use the most inefficient irrigation method… just flooding the fields and if water had a higher price governments might decide it’s worth the money to repair our water infrastructure. 

➢ There are simply more people on earth consuming more water. This century, water consumption has increased sevenfold.

➢ The rain and snow that count on to water crops and refill lakes and rivers is getting less reliable. Climate change is making available water much more erratic.  

Mexico City Water Crisis

Hundreds of years ago, when the Aztecs settled on what is now Mexico City, they saw giant lake. These are the last remnants of canals they made. When the Spanish came into 16th    Century one soldier marveled at the Aztec city rising from water that seemed like an enchanted vision. But then Spanish started draining the lake, and over the next few centuries that space was filled by people. Like in most places, surface water in Mexico was treated as a public resource, key to development and since 1950, Mexico City’s population has exploded. It’s now home to 22 million people. The most important threats for Mexico City are related to water. Mexico city gets more rain than notoriously rainy London, but the lakes that would have collected that are long gone, so the city floods, but they still need to pipe in most of their water from other parts of Mexico or they pump it from underground. The groundwater deposits is called aquifer have accumulated over milliennia.  Mexican take out from local aquifer around 50 % of their water supply, that’s means that probably they’ll loss half of their supply of water in next 30- 50 years.  Sucking of groundwater has another side effect. It compresses the soil so Mexico City literally sinking. In some places, it is sinking as much as nine inches a year.

Cape Town’s Water Crisis

Cape town’s day zero was first scheduled for March 18 but then people started conserving.  The water restriction are clearly having some effect like Day zero has been pushing back by a month, cape town announced it pushed back day zero until July 9th to August 18 but now that’s since been pushed back  to next year because of extraordinary efforts of residents and authorities. By early 2018, the city’s water consumption was less than half what it had been just four years earlier, and the day zero countdown clocks were pushing indefinitely. The Cape Town is also got lucky it rained.

India Water Crisis

Water is the source of life but we are running out of it. Chennai is the India’s largest city that has been gradually losing water because of two reasons low rainfall and depletion of groundwater reservoirs.  Chennai is not only the Indian city with these problem 21 major cities in India including capital Delhi could run out of water as early as next year that’s according to Indian national institution for transforming India another report says that nearly half of population is going to see an extreme of water shortage very soon but in this result of poor management. NASA satellite data shows aquifers in northern India decreasing by 29 trillion gallon in just a decade.

                                     

Pakistan Water Crisis 

Causes of Water Crisis in Pakistan 

• The next major problem in water management is pollution of water resource. 

• Third problem is Mismanagement and corruption in water distribution.

• Lack of planning

• water theft 

• Shortcoming in infrastructure.

How we can converse water? 

We can converse water by making long term planning such as 

• Phase out the outdated system and phase a new and updated irrigation system. Once it happened, our agriculture will need only 15-22 MAF water instead of current of 104 MAF for same level of food production which we have at moment. 

• Aquifer act like natural dams so we need is to do Aquifer management

• The amount of water saved by upgrading irrigation system could be store in aquifers. Aquifer management will cost just one tenth of what a large dam will cost. We need to work on dam equivalent. Des could be made within 3 years whereas building a large Dam might take 12 to 1 years.

• DEs are more long lasting, profitable and sustainable than dams. 

• Preserving water quality.

• Integrated watershed management.

 Pakistan could store 3000 MAF as ground water. 

                    Written by: Samuyya latif