Clean, safe drinking water is scarce. Today, nearly 1 billion people in the developing world don't have access to it.
Yet, we take it for granted, we waste it, and we even pay too much to drink it from little plastic bottles. Water is
the foundation of life. And still today, all around the world, far too many people spend their entire day searching
for it.
Simply put, water scarcity is either the lack of enough water (quantity) or lack of access to safe water (quality). It's
hard for most of us to imagine that clean, safe water is not something that can be taken for granted. But, in the
developing world, finding a reliable source of safe water is often time-consuming and expensive. This is known as
economic scarcity. Water can be found... it simply requires more resources to do it.
In places like sub-Saharan Africa, time lost gathering water and suffering from water-borne diseases is limiting
people's true potential, especially women and girls’. Every day in rural communities and poor urban centers
throughout sub-Saharan Africa, hundreds of millions of people suffer from a lack of possibility to get safe water.
Women and girls especially bear the burden of walking miles at a time to gather water from streams and ponds –
full of water-borne disease that is making them and their families sick.
In other areas, the lack of water is a more profound problem. There simply isn't enough. That is known as physical
scarcity. The problem of water scarcity is a growing one. As more people put ever-increasing demands on limited
supplies, the cost and effort to build or even maintain access to water will increase. And water's importance to
political and social stability will only grow with the crisis.
To give an example of physical scarcity, one should take a look at the report released by China showing that the
country is facing a serious problem with drinking water. According to the study, about 80% of the country's
shallow ground water is not clean enough to drink or bathe in. It can only be used for industrial purposes. Dirty
drinking water exists especially in the countryside, where the population gets water from shallow wells. This
water has become more and more contaminated through farming, factories and household waste.
According to the report large cities are not affected by water pollution because they get their water from
underground reservoirs that are often hundreds or thousands of feet deep. In addition, cities operate purification
plants that get rid of harmful substances before drinking water gets to the people.
However, the use of shallow underground water in rural areas has grown considerably in the past decade. The
report states that nitrates and ammonia are the major pollutants. In some areas, heavy metals were also found in
the water.
Authorities found out that while none of the 2000 investigated wells had a Class I water quality, over 70% were
classified in the worst two categories, those unfit for drinking.