Everyone loves a good TED talk:
Despite water covering 71% of the planet’s surface, more than half the world’s population endures extreme water scarcity. By 2040, up to 20 more countries could be experiencing water shortages. Are we running out of clean water?
According to a University of British Columbia water expert Balsher Singh Sidhu, the Earth can’t run out of freshwater thanks to the water cycle, a system that continuously produces and recycles water, morphing it from vapour, to liquid, to ice as it circulates around the globe. However, 97% of earth’s liquid is saltwater and 3% of potentially usable freshwater, more than two-thirds is frozen in ice caps and glaciers. That leaves less than 1% available for sustaining all life on Earth, spread across our planet in rivers, lakes, underground aquifers, ground ice and permafrost. It’s these sources of water that are being rapidly depleted by humans, but slowly replenished by rain and snowfall.
In a 24 hour period, most people will consume an estimated 3000 liters of water. In fact, household water – which we use to drink, cook, and clean – accounts for only 3.6% of humanity’s water consumption. Another 4.4% goes to the wide range of factories which make the products we buy each day. But the remaining 92% of our water consumption is all spent on a single industry: agriculture.
Agriculture currently covers 37% of Earth’s land area, posing the biggest threat to our regional water supplies. And yet, it’s also a necessity. So how do we limit agriculture’s thirst while still feeding those who rely on it? Farmers are already finding ingenious ways to reduce their impact, like using special irrigation techniques to grow “more crop per drop”, and breeding new crops that are less thirsty. Other industries are following suit, adopting production processes that reuse and recycle water.