A major United Nations report, released in June, shows that the world is not on track to meet a U.N. goal: to bring safe water and sanitation to everyone by 2030.
Will people have enough water to live?
Two main factors are pushing the planet toward a thirstier future: population growth and climate change.
Top 10 countries with lowest access to clean water near home Sources: The Water Gap: State of the World’s Water 2018/WaterAid; The World Bank India has improved water access in rural areas, but remains at the top of the list for sheer number of people (163 million) lacking water services.
Most of the world’s freshwater goes to agriculture, mainly to irrigating crops but also to raising livestock and farming aquatic organisms, such as fish and plants.
“There just isn’t enough water to meet all our needs,” says Paolo D’Odorico, an environmental scientist at the University of California, Berkeley whose team analyzed the food-water-energy nexus in a paper published online April 20 in Reviews of Geophysics.
Source: World Energy Outlook 2016 Special Report: Water-Energy Nexus/IEA Then there’s climate change.
The map below shows how water stress — the ratio of water use to water supply — is expected to look by the year 2040.
Top 20 cities with the largest urban water deficits in 2050 Source: M. Flörke, C. Schneider and R. McDonald/Nature Sustainability 2018 In the face of such inexorable changes, it’s easy to despair.
If nations follow commitments similar to those in the agreement, 60 million people across Asia could avoid dire water scarcity by 2050, the team wrote in June in Environmental Research Letters.