Water Problem
One of the World's great environmental problems - Water
The water problem is today one of the greatest problems the world faces. The UN calculates that if the present development continues the 2/3 of the world population will live with serious water scarcity or nearly without water by the year 2025. The UN calculates that one should have 100 litres of water pr day to manage. This is for everything - home consumption, agriculture, industry, etc. Many people today have less than 50 litres, and in a country like Mozambique there is only 20 litres of water for each person pr day. Those 20 litres are the sum of the water taken from boreholes, rivers and lakes.
We already use over half of all the freshwater, which is available in all the world's rivers, lakes and groundwater, and the UN calculates that this figure is up between 70 and 90 % in the year 2025, unless something radical is done to change this development.
The problem is that more water is used than what is returned to the freshwater systems. The large water consuming areas - USA, China, India, North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula for example use so much water that their water reserves every year are depleted of an amount of water which corresponds to the double of the water running in the Nile - (160 billion m3).
Most of the water is used for agriculture - over 70 % of the consumption. For every kilo of rice, wheat or maize over 1000 litres of water are used.
At the World Summit for Sustainable Development in Johannesburg last year the water problem was one of the only issues where a decision was reached - that the amount of people without access to clean water should be halved by the year 2015. It is between 800 million and 1 billion people who do not have clean water. This means that many die of the accompanying diseases. Between 3 and 4 million people - mostly children - die every year because of water borne diseases. These are diseases spread by contaminated water such as diarrhoea and
The water problem is today one of the greatest problems the world faces. The UN calculates that if the present development continues the 2/3 of the world population will live with serious water scarcity or nearly without water by the year 2025. The UN calculates that one should have 100 litres of water pr day to manage. This is for everything - home consumption, agriculture, industry, etc. Many people today have less than 50 litres, and in a country like Mozambique there is only 20 litres of water for each person pr day. Those 20 litres are the sum of the water taken from boreholes, rivers and lakes.
We already use over half of all the freshwater, which is available in all the world's rivers, lakes and groundwater, and the UN calculates that this figure is up between 70 and 90 % in the year 2025, unless something radical is done to change this development.
The problem is that more water is used than what is returned to the freshwater systems. The large water consuming areas - USA, China, India, North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula for example use so much water that their water reserves every year are depleted of an amount of water which corresponds to the double of the water running in the Nile - (160 billion m3).
Most of the water is used for agriculture - over 70 % of the consumption. For every kilo of rice, wheat or maize over 1000 litres of water are used.
At the World Summit for Sustainable Development in Johannesburg last year the water problem was one of the only issues where a decision was reached - that the amount of people without access to clean water should be halved by the year 2015. It is between 800 million and 1 billion people who do not have clean water. This means that many die of the accompanying diseases. Between 3 and 4 million people - mostly children - die every year because of water borne diseases. These are diseases spread by contaminated water such as diarrhoea and