Environmental

Environmental
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Introduction
Approximately 70% of the surface of the earth is covered with water, however, 97% of this is saltwater that is unfit for human consumption. It cannot be used for drinking, irrigation, and most industrial uses. The remaining 3% is freshwater and of this 3% only approximately 1% is readily available for human consumption (Serageldin, 2010). We believe that there is an infinite supply of water is infinite, however, this is a false assumption as indicated above, there is only 1% of fresh water supply of fresh water. Fresh water is renewed by rainfall only and this is done at a rate of 40,000 to 50,000 km3 per year (Barlow, 2001).
In addition, the river systems on earth are geographically unevenly distributed and much of the water used is wasted or polluted by urbanization, and industrialization. Moreover, the increasing global population has increased dependence on the now scarce resource; water is also ubiquitously used in agriculture, in industry, and households (Barlow, 2001). Overpopulation, deforestation, intensive urbanization, pollution, water diversion, and industrial farming combined with the drying earth’s surface are significantly increasingly depleting the finite small supply of fresh water. These trends are persistent and deplete river basins in every continent. This depletion is increasingly making water an increasingly big commodity (Serageldin, 2010).
Discussion
Indicators of the Looming Crisis
As indicated above, the common assumption held globally is that the world’s water supply is large and infinite. However, the global fresh water supply is only 2.5% with the available supply for consumption being more or less than 1% of the total stock of water with the rest being seawater, inaccessible ice caps, ground and soil water supply which is crucially finite (Serageldin, 2010). It is in the recent past century that rivers ran wild discharging a bulk of their contents in to the seas; utilization of ground water was limited to extraction using manual shallow wells, and crops grown with rain water. The pollution of water was mainly due to sewage disposal that was at minimum and affected only those in zones surrounding the emissions (Jury & Vaux, 2007).
Unlike the uncertainty surrounding the supply of oil scarce minerals and underground fuels, water supply is well characterized and projected. There are no large underground water deposits that have not been discovered in easily accessible regions, therefore, development of newly discovered sources will be expensive to develop. In addition, human activities are increasingly dependent on groundwater supplies utilization and hence exhausting and contaminating the reserves (Jury & Vaux, 2007). Moreover, the projected population growth for the next century will occur in areas having the greatest waiter shortage and currently there are no plans to address this. The economic forces are al...