
The United Nations has warned that humanity’s “lifeblood” – water – is increasingly at risk around the world due to “vampiric overconsumption and overdevelopment.”
In the foreword of the report, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said the world is “blindly traveling a dangerous path” as “unsustainable water use, pollution, and unchecked global warming are draining humanity’s lifeblood.”
Richard Connor, lead author of the report, told AFP that the impact of the “world water crisis” will be a “matter of scenarios.”
“If nothing is done, it will a business-as-usual scenario – it will keep on being between 40 percent and 50 percent of the population of the world that does not have access to sanitation and roughly 20-25 percent of the world will not have access to safe water supply.”
With the global population increasing every day, “in absolute numbers, there’ll be more and more people that don’t have access to these services,” he said.
The UN Water Conference is currently ongoing in New York, where governments and actors in the public and private sectors are invited to present proposals for a so-called water action agenda to reverse the trend and help meet the development goal, set in 2015, of ensuring “access to water and sanitation for all by 2030.”
The report, published by UN-Water and UNESCO, warns that “scarcity is becoming endemic” due to overconsumption and pollution, while global warming will increase seasonal water shortages in both areas with abundant water as well as those already strained.
For now, our problems with water have more to do with delivery rather that sourcing, with the inefficiencies of many of the country’s water districts wasting so much water through pilferage and leakages. It is this abhorrently wasteful usage, of what is fast becoming a precious resource that could become a potential cause of conflict between nations, that has to be stopped as soon as possible, if we are to avoid slipping into a water crisis that the rest of the world is now preparing for.*