66 percent of the world faces water shortages every year.
0 Share this article While it has been known for some time that the world water crisis is among the top three global problems, we now have a more accurate number and percentage of people who are currently facing this problem.
According to the The Huffington Post, it was previously believed through earlier studies that an estimate between "1.7 and 3.1 billion people lived with moderate to severe water scarcity for at least a month out of the year."
Here are the five facts you need to know about Hoekstra’s study and his findings published in the Science Advances Journal.
66 percent of the world population (about 4 billion people) live under conditions of severe water scarcity at least one month of the year.
India and China are the two countries with the largest populations of people facing severe water scarcity.
In India, 1 billion people face severe water shortages each year, while 0.9 billion face severe water scarcity in China.
Some areas have begun to pump so much ground water that we are now facing a new problem, global sea level rises.
Among those ideas is relying on rain-fed agriculture and less on irrigated crops, improving the efficiency of the water we do have and sharing the resources that we do have among each other.
Of these three options given, the third seems to make the most sense, yet seems to be the most difficult challenge yet.