watery facts
Three Gorges Dam,
China
Available fresh water amounts to less
than one half of one percent of all the
water on earth. The rest is seawater, or is
frozen in the polar ice. Fresh water is
naturally renewable only by rainfall, at
the rate of 40-50,000 cubic kilometers per
year.
Thirty one countries and over 1 billion
people completely lack access to clean
water.
More than five million people, most of
them children, die every year from
illnesses caused by drinking poor-quality
water.
A child dies every 8 seconds from
drinking contaminated water.
The annual profits of the water sector
are less than half of those of the oil
sector. But only about 5 percent of the
world’s water is currently in private
hands.
In the past century over half of all
wetlands on the planet have been lost to
development and conversion. Wetlands are
important to the health of natural systems
and people because they act as filters and
flood buffers.
The underground aquifer that supplies
one-third of the water for the continental
US is being depleted eight times faster
than it is being replenished.
In India, some households pay 25 percent
of their income for water.
The manufacture of computer wafers, used
in the production of computer chips, uses
up to 18 million liters of water per day.
Globally, the industry uses 1.5 trillion
liters of water and causes 300 billion
liters of wastewater every year.
57 billion liters of bottled water were
sold worldwide in 1996 and sales of over
143 billion liters are expected by 2006.
People in the United States consumed over
17 billion liters of bottled water in 1999
at a cost of nearly US$5 billion.
Sources: Maude Barlow, “Blue Gold”; Gil
Yaron, “The Final Frontier”;
Public Services International
www.world-psi.org
;
Fortune magazine;World Water Vision;
Pacific Institute
www.pacinst.org
;
www.hf.caltech.edu/whichworld/tour/waterscarcity.html
