Some of you might have seen the classic Mel Gibson’s Max Max or you might have seen the latest Tom Hardy’s Max Max: Fury Road. More or less the plot remains the same – Shortage of Water.
I am not going to review this film. I am not the great Robert Edgar, however, I would love to write something about the shortage of water.
Water scarcity is the lack of sufficient available water resources to meet the demands of water usage within a region. It already affects every continent and around 2.8 billion people around the world at least one month out of every year. More than 1.2 billion people lack access to clean drinking water.
Some facts:
1) 750 million people around the world lack access to safe water; approximately one in nine people.
2) More than twice the population of the United States lives without access to safe water.
3) Diarrhea caused by inadequate drinking water, sanitation, and hand hygiene kills an estimated 842,000 people every year globally, or approximately 2,300 people per day.
Recently I read the news about Middle East will face Water Shortage for next 25 years.
Next 25 years? Incredible. In fact 14 of the 33 likely most water stressed countries in 2040 are in the Middle East.
According to ‘WRI’ World Resource Institute :
a very large number of countries will face water shortage due to rapidly growing populations & increased consumption by people, farms and companies. WRI used climate models in order to calculate the rankings. Chile, Estonia, Namibia, and Botswana could face an especially significant increase in water stress by 2040.
Even the world’s biggest economies will face the water shortage. It may not be extreme but worth noticing. Are we really going to be serious about it and take some action. I can be all high and mighty or I could say that let’s do it at the local level by not wasting the water but bigger companies, entire society as a whole need to take drastic measure. I really do not wish to see any country suffering like this. It is very easy to sit back, relaxed and feel that ‘I’m fine as long as it is not happening in my country’ but one day we will be a part of this problem. One reason why water is so scarce is because farming wastes so much. In addition, many rich people across the region have dug their own wells to tap into aquifers, leading to over-pumping and pollution of groundwater in cities like Damascus.
Or we can simply fight against each other for water like in those post apocalyptic movies.
Source: The Guardian & WRI.
