Water, not oil, is the most precious fluid in our lives, the substance from which all life on the earth has sprung and continues to depend. If we run short of oil and other fossil fuels, we can use alternative energy sources. If we have no clean, drinkable water, we are doomed. As the 6 billion passengers aboard Spaceship Earth enter a complex new century, few issues are as fundamental as water. We are falling far short of the most basic humanitarian goals: sufficient and affordable clean water, food and energy for everyone. “I cannot bear to watch the nations cry,” wrote Derek Walcott, the Caribbean-born Nobel laureate, whose poetry often reflects his African heritage. With regional disputes over water resources increasing, and people and ecosystems alike facing urgent, immense challenges, business as usual is not a viable option.
On a planet that is 71% water, less than 3% of it is fresh. Most of that is either in the form of ice and snow in Greenland and Antarctica or in deep groundwater aquifers. And less than 1% of that water — .01% of all the earth’s water — is considered available for human needs; even then, much of it is far from large populations. At the dawn of the 21st century, more than 1 billion people do not have access to safe drinking water. Some 2.4 billion — 40% of the world’s population — lack adequate sanitation, and 3.4 million die each year from water-related diseases.
The global governmental neglect behind those numbers is “the most critical failure of the 20th century” and the major challenge for the 21st, contends Peter Gleick, one of the world’s leading experts on freshwater resources. “Governments, ngos and local communities must address this problem first — as their top priority,” says Gleick, director of the California-based Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security. “There are many tools for doing so, and the economic costs are not high compared to the costs of failing to meet these needs.”
“We are facing a world water gap right now, this minute,” the World Commission on Water has warned, “and the crisis will only get worse. The consequences of failing to bridge the gap will be higher food prices and expensive food imports for water-scarce countries that are predominantly poor.” Hunger and thirst are also linked to political instability and low rates of economic growth.
Scientists, water professionals, environmental campaigners and others have warned for decades that a water crisis was building — alarm bells that rang on many a deaf governmental ear. The crisis is partly due to natural cycles of extreme weather and the expansion and contraction of arid regions. But human activity has been playing an ever-greater role in creating water scarcity and “water stress” — defined as the indication that there is not enough good-quality water to meet human and environmental needs. Like so much of the earth’s bounty, water is unevenly distributed. While people in some parts of the world pile up sandbags to control seasonal floods or struggle to dry out after severe storms, others either shrivel and die — like their crops and their livestock before them — or move on as environmental refugees. In Canada — which has about the same amount of water as China but less than 2.5% of its population — the resource has been labeled “blue gold.” In parched Botswana, dominated by the Kalahari Desert, water is so precious that the national currency is called pula — “rain” in the Setswana language.
