Current Water Issues in the World

Water is the most abundant substance in the human body, making up to 60% of an adult’s weight and up to 80% of infant’s weight. A person can live several days without food, but just a few days without water. Like air, water is essential to life. Because water is so much important to life, health and nutrition experts recommended drinking at least two liters of water a day.

Although, the water means so much to human life, there are still problems of inadequate access to safe drinking water for about 884 million people. Moreover, there are about 2.5 billion people inadequately access to sanitation and waste disposal (UNICEF 2008).

Apart from the worldwide water scarcity problem, water pollution becomes a major problem in global context. Many developing countries facing with the disposal wastes from industrial and household contaminating their sources of consumption water.

Australia is the driest inhabited continent even though some areas have annual rainfall of over 1200 millimeters. The climate is highly various across the country and drought becomes the major problem thorough the continent. Since 2000s, Most Australia capital cities are facing a major water crisis with less than 50% of water storages remaining in reservoirs. Drought conditions often provide too little water to support food crops, through either natural precipitation or irrigation using reserve water supplies. The same problem affects grass and grain used to feed livestock and poultry. When drought undermines or destroys food sources, people go hungry. When the drought is severe and continues over a long period, famine may occur. Also, Drought often creates a lack of clean water for drinking, public sanitation and personal hygiene, which can lead to a wide range of life-threatening diseases.

Dajarra, a town in the far north-west of outback Queensland, near the border with the Northern Territory, is the target of the project which has been suffered from drought and contaminated drinking water. As they rely on rain water and store it in tanks unfortunately, the water is too salty and it corrodes everything. Therefore, the idea of installing desalination device to turn the salty water to drinkable water for the community was created.

sources:

http://www.unicef.org/media/files/Joint_Monitoring_Report_-_17_July_2008.pdf

WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation (2008), Progress in Drinking-water and Sanitation: special focus on sanitation. (MDG Assessment Report 2008)