How much of our blue planet is salt water and unfit
for human use?
a) 50% b) 70% c) 97.5%?
C
Where is the majority of fresh water
a) Lakes b) rivers c) polar regions C
What percentage of fresh water is usable
a) 20% b) 50% c) 1% C
What factors increase our demand for water?
Increase in population, industrialization, drought and
irrigation
What percentage of world water use is consumed by
Agriculture: 70%
Domestic Use: 8%
Industry: 22%
How much water in litres is needed to produce a kilo of food
in the following:
Potatoes 1,000
Wheat 1,400
Rice 3,450
Chicken 4,600
Beef 42,500
It takes 7 litres of water to produce one plastic water
bottle.
By 2025 two thirds of the world’s people will be facing water
stress - 11 years from now!
Water need
The recommended basic water requirement is 50 litres per day
but people can get by with 30 litres a day. The average use in
Britain: 200
litres
Gambia: 4.5
litres
Mali: 8
litres
Uganda 9.3
litres
USA 500
litres
Contamination
Due to chemicals, pollution, toxins, human and animal waste
and don’t get me started on fracking there are a lot of people getting sick. 4
Billion case of diarrhea worldwide every year and 2.2 million avoidable
deaths…a death every 14 seconds. Most of the world does not have a safe supply
of water and in some countries women walk for hours to fetch water. In Jakarta, the poor pay
water vendors 60 times the price of water on the standard connection, in Haiti they pay 100 times!
Half a billion people live in countries chronically short of water. By 2050 this is likely to rise to more than 4 billion. The problem is exacerbated by unsustainable depletion of groundwater stock, where nearly all of the world’s available fresh water is stored. 97% of fresh water is stored in these aquifers. They are severely deplete
in parts of India, China, the Middle East, the U.S. and North Africa. The world
is currently running a groundwater overdraft of 200 billion cubic metres a
year.
Source: New Internationalist. Guardian.
No comments:
Post a Comment