I think the photo is quite illustrative: we are squeezing our planet!
It comes from an article in the magazine ‘Scientific American’ named Facing the Freshwater Crisis and I have found it interesting.
The author explains that, for example, people living in New Delhi, one of the richest cities in India, wakes in the morning with the announce that freshwater will only be available for the next hour, so they have to stock water to last the day. This occurs because water managers decided to divert large amounts of water to irrigate crops.
At the opposite end, in
These are only two examples about the great power of policymakers on water resources. The demand for freshwater is overtaking the supply in many places. Today one out of six people suffer inadequate access to safe freshwater. By midcentury three quarters of the earth population (!) could experience scarcities of freshwater. Water scarcity is thought to become more common because human population is rising, many people are getting richer, so expanding demand, a lot of water sources are threatened by pollutants or water salinization …
But he says that technologies and tools needed to conserve existing freshwater are known. So ‘what is needed now is action’! Governments and authorities have to execute plans for implementing measures, but in my opinion the civil society has also to act. I think that we have more power than we think and with little changes in our daily lives we can save lots of water. For example, at home I take the water that comes out of the shower before it is hot in a bucket and I use it for the WC. I save 5 L each time, is not too much but in total it makes a not scorn quantity.
One solution that he proposes is to setting higher prices for water, but is it a good solution? What do you think about?
I will finish with an old saying from American West: “Water usually runs downhill, but it always runs uphill to money”.
