Water crisis

A water crisis is a state of drought. It is an alarming situation which has emerged in particular in arid and semi-arid regions of the world because there have settled people and learn through natural cycles, awkward land use, population trends or problematic political and technical measures a lack of water.

If water is lacking, this may also relate to inadequate water quality. Although the Earth has large amounts of sea water, but this is without desalination technology for humans, animals and plants can not be used as water for drinking or washing.

The pollution of groundwater or surface water can cause this can not be used as drinking water or for irrigation of crops and thus increases the water shortage situation.

A drop in the water table, for example, caused by river regulation, groundwater extraction, groundwater barriers or changes in climate can lead to desertification or desertification.

Follow

Especially in low rainfall areas and mega cities and metropolitan areas of the developing world resulting from water shortage and pollution health problems: A total of about 5 million people die each year of waterborne diseases, chronic diarrhea, for example. Worldwide suffer following an investigation by the UN about 800 million people suffer from shortage of drinking water ( half of them children ), and about 3.2 billion people are not equipped with an adequate safe sanitation. The world population is growing - for the year 2050 predict the UN approximately 8.9 billion citizens of the world. This means that the competition is growing for access to vital water resources. In the coming years, threatening the worldwide shortage of water resources increase; in 2025 about 1.8 billion people might not have sufficient drinking water resources.

Recognition of the world water crisis

The Middle East and North Africa today are the regions with the most pronounced lack of water. Also in Europe (eg Spain and Italy), indications of lack of drinking water. In the next 25 years it is expected that this deficiency state to Pakistan, southern Africa, and large parts of India and China expands. This means that the conflicts over water will increase between and within states and may lead to wars. Furthermore represent use conflicts between agriculture, households and industry, and a wasteful use of water challenges for future water management, especially in emerging and developing countries. 2002 underlined the outstanding importance of this issue to the UN or the World Summit in Johannesburg. There very demanding targets have been written ( as so-called Millennium Development Goals ) for access to water and safe sanitation technologies: the number of people who have no access to clean drinking water and sanitation is to be halved by 2015. The UN General Assembly has the period from 2005 to 2014 the International Decade for Action - explains "Water for Life".

Solutions

The water problem is usually associated with economic weakness. This ability is limited to apply infrastructure, investment and energy costs. Therefore it is pointless to build upon central European model expensive and energy consuming systems of the central supply unit with water in best quality drinking water for all purposes, and to the central sewage disposal and purification. Rather, appropriate development assistance must relate specifically to technology, working with renewable energy and as far as possible readily available means. As an example one could mention here the solar water distillation, customized in the wastewater sector and ecologically oriented sanitation ( Ecosan ). For the mega-cities it will be important to find intelligent combinations of alternative supply and disposal technologies and build.