Water is a lost issue in the contemporary environmental debate. The issues that dominate are climate disruption, biodiversity loss and destruction of the ozone layer. These are all often thought of global issues and global problems. Society as a whole has a moral obligation to stop them. Water, on the other hand, is a local issue, right? Why should someone in one of the most water-rich nations on the planet in the United States care about the plight of someone in the Kalahari Desert, or the Thar, thousands of miles away? It won’t effect us and there’s nothing we can do, right? Wrong. Building water infrastructure in many of these countries requires international cooperation in order to increase human development. Foreign capital investment is sometimes necessary as well.
A partial explanation of why framing water scarcity as one of the most threatening international dilemmas of our time is that it is difficult to draw a comprehensive global picture. Water availability, use, and quality quite obviously varies based on the geographic region. But there are also seasonal, annual and other time scales that make simple global generalizations about quality and supply issues impossible to make. Models based on population growth and changes in output have proven inadequate as well, partly because they are so complex and the inputs are so hard to project, as are the determinants of water supply and demand.
Despite this, we MUST recognize water as one of the greatest challenges of this century. More than a billion people around the world lack clean drinking water. Two billion lack adequate sanitation services. Think about that for a second. You use water for cooking, cleaning clothes, your house, your car, for bathing, for brushing your teeth, for disposing of human waste, for washing your hands, watering your plants, and maybe even for your pets to drink. Yet nearly one in six people in the world do not even have enough that is safe to drink. Any meaningful notion of sustainability cannot be based on limiting our inputs of carbon alone. Alongside this ideal needs to be providing an adequate supply of water for meeting basic human needs while safeguarding, conserving and maximizing what we have.
Human manipulation of nature has only made the situation more dire, and the future does not look bright. We manipulate our water, intervening in the water cycle, by building dams, channels, canals, and other forms of river manipulation that has trapped it from flowing as it naturally would, and devastated freshwater fish species. In fact, forty percent of the world’s known fish species live in freshwater habitats although these bodies of water occupy less than one percent of the earth’s surface. Furthermore, climate disruption affects water as well. Deserts are expanding inside, rainfall is tougher to predict, and many places on earth are on their way to becoming inhospitable.
