drinking water problem essay

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Water Stress: A Global Problem That’s Getting Worse

• Water scarcity happens when communities can’t fulfill their water needs, either because supplies are insufficient or infrastructure is inadequate. Today, billions of people face some form of water stress.
• Countries have often cooperated on water management. Still, there are a handful of places where transboundary waters are driving tensions, such as the Nile Basin.
• Climate change will likely exacerbate water stress worldwide, as rising temperatures lead to more unpredictable weather and extreme weather events, including floods and droughts.

Introduction

Billions of people around the world lack adequate access to one of the essential elements of life: clean water. Although governments and aid groups have helped many living in water-stressed regions gain access in recent years, the problem is projected to get worse due to global warming and population growth. Meanwhile, a paucity of international coordination on water security has slowed the search for solutions.

Water stress can differ dramatically from one place to another, in some cases causing wide-reaching damage, including to public health, economic development, and global trade. It can also drive mass migrations and spark conflict. Now, pressure is mounting on countries to implement more sustainable and innovative practices and to improve international cooperation on water management.

What is water stress?

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Water stress or scarcity occurs when demand for safe, usable water in a given area exceeds the supply. On the demand side, the vast majority—roughly 70 percent—of the world’s freshwater is used for agriculture, while the rest is divided between industrial (19 percent) and domestic uses (11 percent), including for drinking. On the supply side, sources include surface waters, such as rivers, lakes, and reservoirs, as well as groundwater, accessed through aquifers.

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But scientists have different ways of defining and measuring water stress, taking into account a variety of factors including seasonal changes, water quality, and accessibility. Meanwhile, measurements of water stress can be imprecise, particularly in the case of groundwater. “Any numbers out there have to be taken with a grain of salt,” says Upmanu Lall , a Columbia University professor and water expert. “None of these definitions are typically accounting for groundwater usage, or groundwater stock.”

What causes water scarcity?

Water scarcity is often divided into two categories: physical scarcity, when there is a shortage of water because of local ecological conditions; and economic scarcity, when there is inadequate water infrastructure.

The two frequently come together to cause water stress. For instance, a stressed area can have both a shortage of rainfall as well as a lack of adequate water storage and sanitation facilities. Experts say that even when there are significant natural causes for a region’s water stress, human factors are often central to the problem, particularly with regard to access to clean water and safe sanitation. Most recently, for example, the war in Ukraine damaged critical infrastructure, leaving six million people with limited or no access to safe water in 2022.

“Almost always the drinking water problem has nothing to do with physical water scarcity,” says Georgetown University’s Mark Giordano , an expert on water management. “It has to do with the scarcity of financial and political wherewithal to put in the infrastructure to get people clean water. It’s separate.”

At the same time, some areas that suffer physical water scarcity have the infrastructure that has allowed life there to thrive, such as in Oman and the southwestern United States.

A variety of authorities, from the national level down to local jurisdictions, govern or otherwise influence the water supply. In the United States, more than half a dozen federal agencies deal with different aspects of water: the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) enforces regulations on clean water, while the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) prepares for and responds to water disasters . Similar authorities exist at the state and local levels to protect and oversee the use of water resources, including through zoning and rehabilitation projects.

Which regions are most water-stressed?

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is the worst off in terms of physical water stress, according to most experts. MENA receives less rainfall than other regions, and its countries tend to have fast-growing, densely populated urban centers that require more water. But many countries in these regions, especially wealthier ones, still meet their water needs. For example, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) imports nearly all of its food, alleviating the need to use water for agriculture. The UAE and other wealthy MENA countries also rely heavily on the desalination of abundant ocean water, albeit this process is an expensive, energy-intensive one.

Meanwhile, places experiencing significant economic scarcity include Central African countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo , which receives a lot of rain but lacks proper infrastructure and suffers from high levels of mismanagement.

Even high-income countries experience water stress. Factors including outdated infrastructure and rapid population growth have put tremendous stress on some U.S. water systems , causing crises in cities including Flint, Michigan, and Newark, New Jersey.

How is climate change affecting water stress?

For every 1°C (1.8°F) increase in the global average temperature, UN experts project a 20 percent drop in renewable water resources. Global warming is expected to increase the number of water-stressed areas and heighten water stress in already affected regions. Subtropical areas, such as Australia, the southern United States, and North African countries, are expected to warm and suffer more frequent and longer droughts; however, when rainfall does occur in these regions, it is projected to be more intense. Weather in tropical regions will likewise become more variable, climate scientists say.

Agriculture could become a particular challenge. Farming suffers as rainfall becomes more unpredictable and rising temperatures accelerate the evaporation of water from soil. A more erratic climate is also expected to bring more floods, which can wipe out crops an overwhelm storage systems. Furthermore, rainfall runoff can sweep up sediment that can clog treatment facilities and contaminate other water sources.

In a 2018 report , a panel consisting of many of the world’s top climate researchers showed that limiting global warming to a maximum 1.5°C (2.7°F) above preindustrial levels—the aim of the Paris Agreement on climate—could substantially reduce the likelihood of water stress in some regions, such as the Mediterranean and southern Africa, compared to an unchecked increase in temperature. However, most experts say the Paris accord will not be enough to prevent the most devastating effects of climate change.

What are its impacts on public health and development?

Prolonged water stress can have devastating effects on public health and economic development. More than two billion people worldwide lack access to safe drinking water; and nearly double that number—more than half the world’s population—are without adequate sanitation services . These deprivations can spur the transmission of diseases such as cholera, typhoid, polio, hepatitis A, and diarrhea.

At the same time, because water scarcity makes agriculture much more difficult, it threatens a community’s access to food. Food-insecure communities can face both acute and chronic hunger, where children are more at risk of conditions stemming from malnutrition, such as stunting and wasting, and chronic illnesses due to poor diet, such as diabetes.

Even if a water-stressed community has stable access to potable water, people can travel great lengths or wait in long lines to get it—time that could otherwise be spent at work or at school. Economists note these all combine [PDF] to take a heavy toll on productivity and development.

Living in a Water-Stressed World

A housing development lies on the edge of Cathedral City, a desert resort town in southern California, in April 2015.

Eleven-year-old Chikuru carries water in a plastic jerrican, which weighs about forty pounds when full, to her home in Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo, in September 2019.

The water level at Camlidere Dam in the Turkish capital of Ankara is low due to seasonal drought and high water consumption amid the COVID-19 pandemic, November 2020.

A young boy washes a cooking pot in a pool of rainwater outside a slum where members of the Muhamasheen minority group live in Sanaa, Yemen, July 2020.

Abdel-Shaheed Gerges, a farmer, touches water flowing through a government-developed irrigation channel in Esna, Egypt, in October 2019.

Summer Weeks bathes her two-year-old daughter, Ravynn, outside their home in the Navajo Nation in Arizona, September 2020.

A worker waters turf at a sprawling horse-racing facility in Dubai in March 2021.

A woman collects water from a well dug in the Black Umfolozi Riverbed, which is dry due to drought, outside of Durban, South Africa, in January 2016.

The shadow of a girl who fled Raqqa is cast on the wall of a water spigot at a camp for internally displaced people in Syria, August 2017.

Kevin Dudley carries his daughter, Katelyn, and bottles of water to his apartment amid weeks-long water outages across Jackson, Mississippi, in March 2021.

A woman uses swamp water to wash clothes in northern Jakarta, Indonesia, in March 2018.

The COVID-19 pandemic heightened the need for safe water access. Handwashing is one of the most effective tools for combating the coronavirus, but health experts noted that three in ten individuals —2.3 billion people globally—could not wash their hands at home at the pandemic’s onset.

How has water factored into international relations?

Many freshwater sources transcend international borders, and, for the most part, national governments have been able to manage these resources cooperatively. Roughly three hundred international water agreements have been signed since 1948. Finland and Russia, for example, have long cooperated on water-management challenges, including floods, fisheries, and pollution. Water-sharing agreements have even persisted through cross-border conflicts about other issues, as has been the case with South Asia’s Indus River and the Jordan River in the Middle East.

However, there are a handful of hot spots where transboundary waters are a source of tension, either because there is no agreement in place or an existing water regime is disputed. One of these is the Nile Basin, where the White and Blue Nile Rivers flow from lakes in East Africa northward to the Mediterranean Sea. Egypt claims the rights to most of the Nile’s water based on several treaties, the first dating back to the colonial era; but other riparian states say they are not bound to the accords because they were never party to them. The dispute has flared in recent years after Ethiopia began construction of a massive hydroelectric dam that Egypt says drastically cuts its share of water.

Transboundary water disputes can also fuel intrastate conflict; some observers note this has increased in recent years , particularly in the hot spots where there are fears of cross-border conflict. For example, a new hydropower project could benefit elites but do little to improve the well-being of the communities who rely on those resources.

Moreover, water stress can affect global flows of goods and people. For instance, wildfires and drought in 2010 wiped out Russian crops, which resulted in a spike in commodities prices and food riots in Egypt and Tunisia at the start of the Arab uprisings. Climate stress is also pushing some to migrate across borders. The United Nations predicts that without interventions in climate change, water scarcity in arid and semi-arid regions will displace hundreds of millions of people by 2030.

What are international organizations and governments doing to alleviate water stress?

There has been some international mobilization around water security. Ensuring the availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all is one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) , a sweeping fifteen-year development agenda adopted by member states in 2015. Smart water management is also vital to many of the other SDGs, such as eliminating hunger and ensuring good health and well-being. And while the Paris Agreement on climate does not refer to water explicitly, the United Nations calls [PDF] water management an “essential component of nearly all the mitigation and adaptation strategies.” The organization warns of the increasing vulnerability of conventional water infrastructure, and points to many climate-focused alternatives, such as coastal reservoirs and solar-powered water systems.

However, there is no global framework for addressing water stress, like there is for fighting climate change or preserving biodiversity . The most recent UN summit on water, held in March 2023, was the first such conference since 1977 and didn’t aim to produce an international framework. It instead created a UN envoy on water and saw hundreds of governments, nonprofits, and businesses sign on to a voluntary Water Action Agenda, which analysts called an important but insufficient step compared to a binding agreement among world governments.

Some governments and partner organizations have made progress in increasing access to water services: Between 2000 and 2017, the number of people using safely managed drinking water and safely managed sanitation services rose by 10 percent and 17 percent, respectively. In 2022, the Joe Biden administration announced an action plan to elevate global water security as a critical component of its efforts to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives. But the pace of climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic have presented new challenges. Now, many countries say they are unlikely to implement integrated water management systems by 2030, the target date for fulfilling the SDGs. 

Still, some governments are taking ambitious and creative steps to improve their water security that could serve as models for others:

Green infrastructure . Peruvian law mandates that water utilities reinvest a portion of their profits into green infrastructure (the use of plant, soil, and other natural systems to manage stormwater), and Canada and the United States have provided tens of millions of dollars in recent years to support Peru’s efforts [PDF]. Vietnam has taken similar steps to integrate natural and more traditional built water infrastructure.

Wastewater recycling . More and more cities around the globe are recycling sewage water into drinking water, something Namibia’s desert capital has been doing for decades. Facilities in countries including China and the United States turn byproducts from wastewater treatment into fertilizer.

Smarter agriculture . Innovations in areas such as artificial intelligence and genome editing are also driving progress. China has become a world leader in bioengineering crops to make them more productive and resilient.

Recommended Resources

The Wilson Center’s Lauren Risi writes that water wars between countries have not come to pass, but subnational conflicts over the resource are already taking a toll.

CFR’s Why It Matters podcast talks to Georgetown University’s Mark Giordano and the Global Water Policy Project’s Sandra Postel about water scarcity .

The World Economic Forum describes the growing water crisis in the Horn of Africa, while National Geographic looks at how the prolonged drought is pushing wildlife closer to towns.

The World Resources Institute’s Aqueduct maps the areas facing extremely high water stress.

The United Nations shares facts about water and its role in all aspects of life.

BuzzFeed News interviews residents of Jackson, Mississippi , who lost access to safe water after freezing temperatures wreaked havoc on the city’s decaying infrastructure.

• Sustainable Development Goals (UN)

Emily Lieberman contributed to this Backgrounder. Michael Bricknell and Will Merrow helped create the graphics.

• What are its impacts on health and development?
• What is being done to alleviate water stress?

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Clean Water

Clean and safe water is essential for good health. how did access change over time where do people lack access.

Access to clean water is one of our most basic human needs.

However, one in four people in the world does not have access to safe drinking water, which is a major health risk. Unsafe water is responsible for more than a million deaths each year.

This article looks at data on access to safe water and its implications for health worldwide.

Unsafe water sources are responsible for over one million deaths each year

Unsafe water is one of the world's largest health and environmental problems, particularly for the poorest people .

The Global Burden of Disease is a major global study on the causes and risk factors for death and disease published in the medical journal The Lancet . These estimates of the annual number of deaths attributed to a wide range of risk factors are shown here.

Lack of access to safe water sources is a leading risk factor for infectious diseases, including cholera, diarrhea , dysentery, hepatitis A, typhoid, and polio . 1 It also exacerbates malnutrition and, in particular, childhood stunting . The chart shows that it ranks globally as a significant risk factor for death.

The global distribution of deaths from unsafe water

In low-income countries, unsafe water sources account for a significant share of deaths.

Globally, unsafe water sources account for a few percent of deaths.

In low-income countries, it accounts for around twice as many deaths .

The map here shows the share of annual deaths attributed to unsafe water worldwide.

When we compare the share of deaths attributed to unsafe water over time or between countries, we are not only comparing the extent of water access but its severity in the context of other risk factors for death. Clean water's share depends not only on how many die prematurely from it but also on what else people are dying from and how this is changing.

Death rates are much higher in low-income countries

Death rates from unsafe water sources give us an accurate comparison of differences in mortality impacts between countries and over time. In contrast to the share of deaths that we studied before, death rates are not influenced by how other causes or risk factors for death are changing.

This map shows the death rates from unsafe water sources worldwide. Death rates measure the number of deaths per 100,000 people in a given country or region.

What becomes clear is the significant differences in death rates between countries: rates are high in lower-income countries, particularly across Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. Rates here are often greater than 50 deaths per 100,000 people.

Compare this with death rates across high-income countries: across Europe, rates are below 0.1 deaths per 100,000. That’s a greater than 1000-fold difference.

Therefore, unsafe water sources are limited primarily to low and lower-middle-income countries.

This relationship is clearly shown when we plot death rates versus income, as shown here . There is a strong negative relationship: death rates decline as countries get richer.

Access to safe drinking water

What share of people have access to safe drinking water.

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Target 6.1 is to: “achieve universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all” by 2030.

Almost three-quarters of the world's population uses a safely managed water source . One in four people does not use a safe drinking water source.

The following chart breaks down drinking water use globally and across regions and income groups. In countries with the lowest incomes, less than one-third of the population uses safely managed water. Most live in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The world has made progress in recent years, but unfortunately, this has been very slow. In 2015 (at the start of the SDGs), around 70% of the global population had safe drinking water, and this has slowly increased over recent years.

If progress continues at these slow rates, we will not reach the target of universal, equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water by 2030.

In the map shown, we see the share of people worldwide using safe drinking water facilities.

How many people do not have access to safe drinking water?

The map shows the number of people worldwide who do not use safe drinking water facilities.

What share of people do not use an improved water source?

The definition of an improved drinking water source is: “...those that have the potential to deliver safe water by nature of their design and construction, and include: piped water, boreholes or tubewells, protected dug wells, protected springs, rainwater, and packaged or delivered water.” Note that drinking water from an improved source does not ensure that the water is safe or adequate, as these characteristics are not tested at the time of the survey. However, improved drinking water technologies are more likely than unimproved ones to provide safe drinking water and prevent contact with human excreta.

The map shows the share of people worldwide who do not use improved water sources.

The map shows the number of people worldwide who do not use improved water sources.

What determines levels of clean water usage?

Usage of improved water sources increases with income.

The visualization shows the relationship between improved water source usage and gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. We see a general link between income and improved water source usage.

Typically, most countries with more than 90% of households with improved water have an average GDP per capita of over $10,000 to 15,000. Those at lower incomes tend to have a larger share of the population without access.

Although income is an important determinant, the range of levels of usage that occur across countries of similar prosperity further supports the suggestion that other important governance and infrastructural factors contribute.

Rural households often lag in improved water usage

In addition to the significant inequalities in improved water usage between countries, there can also be large differences within countries. In the charts, we plotted the share of the urban versus rural population using improved water sources and safely managed drinking water, respectively. Here, we have also shown a line of parity; if a country lies along this line, then access in rural and urban areas is equal.

Since nearly all points lie above this line, with few exceptions, usage of improved water sources is greater in urban areas than rural ones. This may be partly attributed to an income effect; urbanization is a trend strongly related to  economic growth. 2

The infrastructural challenges of developing municipal water networks in rural areas are also likely to contribute to lower usage levels relative to urbanized populations.

Definitions

Improved water source : "Improved drinking water sources can deliver safe water by nature of their design and construction, and include: piped water, boreholes or tube wells, protected dug wells, protected springs, rainwater, and packaged or delivered water".

Using drinking water from an improved source does not ensure that the water is safe or adequate, as these characteristics are not tested at the time of the survey. However, improved drinking water technologies are more likely than those characterized as unimproved to provide safe drinking water and prevent contact with human excrement.

Safely managed drinking water: "Safely managed drinking water" is defined as an "Improved source located on premises, available when needed, and free from microbiological and priority chemical contamination."

'Basic' drinking water source: an "Improved source within 30 minutes round trip collection time."

'Limited' drinking water source: "Improved source over 30 minutes round trip collection time."

' Unimproved' drinking water source: "Unimproved source that does not protect against contamination."

'No service': access to surface water only.

WHO (2023) – Fact sheet – Sanitation. Updated September 2023. Online here .

Spence, M., Annez, P. C., & Buckley, R. M. (2009).  Urbanization and growth: commission on growth and development . Available online .

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Water Inequality

Lack of safe drinking water and adequate sanitation effects countries around the globe.

Anthropology, Biology, Health, Conservation, Geography, Human Geography, Social Studies

Water Bucket Woman

A woman carries buckets full of water in a small village in northern India.

Photograph by Sean Gallagher

More than 70 percent of Earth’s surface is covered in water, yet lack of access to clean water is one of the most pressing challenges of our time. As of 2015, 29 percent of people globally suffer from lack of access to safely managed drinking water. More than double that number are at risk for water contamination from improper wastewater management. Poor water quality affects various aspects of society, from the spread of disease to crop growth to infant mortality. In some regions of the world, lack of sanitation infrastructure , water treatment facilities, or sanitary latrines lead to dire clean water crises. In several countries around the world, a major contributor to water contamination is open defecation—the practice of using fields, forests, lakes, rivers, or other natural, open areas to deposit feces. Almost one billion people worldwide still practice open defecation rather than using a toilet. It is particularly common in South Asian countries like India and Nepal, where it is practiced by about 32 percent of people in the region. A landlocked country in the Himalayas, Nepal has access to clean water from mountain rivers, but over 20 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. In a disturbing study, 75 percent of drinking water samples from schools in Nepal were contaminated with fecal bacteria. While open defecation is most common in rural communities, it still occurs in areas with sanitation access, indicating a need for awareness campaigns to teach the dangers of the practice. Moreover, pollution from open defecation is further complicated by contamination from natural disasters such as recurring floods. In sub-Saharan Africa, the proportion of the population practicing open defecation is slightly smaller—around 23 percent—but 40 percent of the population lacks safe drinking water. Moreover, the gender inequality in this region is more prominent than in South Asia. In sub-Saharan Africa, more than 25 percent of the population must walk 30 minutes or more to collect water, a burden that falls on women and girls the vast majority of the time. This trend of women tasked with the responsibility of water collection spans many developing nations and takes critical quality time away from income generation, child care, and household chores. Moreover, Africa has a high risk for desertification , which will reduce the availability of fresh water even further, and increase the threat of water inequality in the future. While South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa represent the largest percentage of people that lack access to safe drinking water, the water crisis is not limited to these areas, nor is it limited to developing countries. For example, the Arctic nations are deemed developed, but several suffer from water and sanitation challenges. Alaska in the United States, Russia, and Greenland all contain rural areas that lack safe in-house water and sanitation facilities. Some people living in these areas must not only carry their own water into their homes, they must also remove human waste themselves, collecting it and hauling it out of the home. The process is time consuming and risks contamination of household surfaces and drinking water. Furthermore, hauling water into homes is physically demanding, and storage capacity is limited, so households often function on inadequate water supplies. Several studies have connected these water-quality constraints with high disease rates in Arctic communities. Even in the United States and many nations in Europe, where advanced wastewater treatment facilities and expansive pipelines supply quality water to both cities and rural areas, poor system maintenance, infrastructure failures, and natural disasters reveal the very serious effects of poor water quality (even short-term) on developed nations. In a recent example, drinking water in Flint, Michigan, was inadequately treated beginning in 2014, and residents bathed in, cooked with, and drank water with toxic lead levels. Additionally, some communities in the contiguous United States chronically lack clean water and sanitation. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in the Navajo Nation, the largest Native American reservation in the United States, almost 8,000 homes lack access to safe drinking water, and 7,500 have insufficient sewer facilities. Luckily, global organizations are committed to addressing the water-quality crisis. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development from the United Nations tackles water inequality within one of its seventeen priority goals, to “ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all.” This initiative is a continuation of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals from the 2000s, which also included goals to reduce the portion of the population that lacked access to infrastructure for quality water and sanitation. These goals have resulted in access to improved sources of drinking water for more than 90 percent of the world—and the 2030 Agenda seeks to continue to improve these numbers alongside greater strides in the area of sanitation. National Geographic Explorers are also committed to global water equality and are combatting these issues with diverse methods. Explorer Sasha Kramer is helping to implement sustainable sanitation practices in Haiti by recycling human waste into soil. Explorer Ashley Murray develops economically advantageous approaches to improving water quality in Ghana, exploring next-generation technologies and new business models to make waste management profitable. Explorer Alexandra Cousteau, granddaughter of the late and legendary Jacques Cousteau, uses storytelling and digital assets to educate people around the globe about the importance of water quality. Moreover, complementing these examples and the many other Explorer-driven efforts dedicated to improving water quality, Explorer Feliciano dos Santos uses music to educate remote villages in Mozambique about the importance of sanitation and hygiene.

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Related Resources

Essay on Problem of Drinking Water

Students are often asked to write an essay on Problem of Drinking Water in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Problem of Drinking Water

Introduction.

Water is life’s essential element, but many people lack access to clean drinking water. This is a global issue that needs immediate attention.

Lack of clean water leads to diseases like diarrhea and cholera, affecting people’s health and productivity.

We can solve this by conserving water, reducing pollution, and improving water treatment facilities.

Also check:

250 Words Essay on Problem of Drinking Water

The global crisis: drinking water scarcity.

The availability of clean, potable water is a fundamental human right, yet it remains a critical issue worldwide. The scarcity of drinking water is not merely a problem confined to developing nations; it is a global challenge that demands immediate attention.

Roots of the Problem

Water scarcity stems from several interconnected factors. Population growth and urbanization have led to an increased demand for water, while climate change and pollution have severely affected its supply. Over-extraction of groundwater and mismanagement of water resources have further exacerbated the situation.

The Health Implications

The health implications of drinking water scarcity are severe. Contaminated water can lead to diseases like cholera and dysentery, and long-term exposure to pollutants can cause chronic illnesses. The lack of access to clean water also disproportionately affects vulnerable groups, such as children and the elderly.

Addressing the Issue

500 words essay on problem of drinking water, the global challenge: water scarcity.

Water, the fundamental resource for sustaining life, is alarmingly becoming scarce. The problem of drinking water is a pressing issue that needs immediate attention. Despite the fact that our planet is 71% water, freshwater, suitable for human consumption, accounts for less than 1% of the total water resources. This essay explores the gravity of the drinking water problem, its causes, impacts, and potential solutions.

Causes of Water Scarcity

The causes of water scarcity are multifaceted. Rapid urbanization and population growth are leading to an increased demand for water. Irresponsible consumption and waste of water, coupled with inefficient water management systems, further exacerbate the problem.

Impacts of Water Scarcity

The impacts of water scarcity are far-reaching. It threatens human health as inadequate access to clean water leads to the spread of waterborne diseases. Economically, it hampers agricultural productivity and industrial output, leading to food insecurity and job loss.

Addressing the Problem

However, technology alone is not enough. It must be complemented by effective policies and regulations that promote sustainable water use, protect water sources from pollution, and ensure equitable access to water.

In conclusion, the problem of drinking water is a complex issue that requires a comprehensive and multifaceted approach. While the challenge is monumental, it is not insurmountable. With the right blend of technology, policy, education, and international cooperation, we can ensure the availability and sustainable management of water for all, fulfilling one of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. The future of our planet and the survival of the next generations hinge on how effectively we address this pressing issue.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

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• The Water Crisis

The power of water

Water connects every aspect of life. Access to safe water and sanitation can quickly turn problems into potential – empowering people with time for school and work, and contributing to improved health for women, children, and families around the world. 

Today, 2.2 billion people – 1 in 4 – lack access to safe water and 3.5 billion people – 2 in 5 – lack access to a safe toilet. These are the people we empower.

Learn more about the global water crisis >

Learn more about the global sanitation crisis >

A women's crisis

Women are disproportionately affected by the water crisis, as they are often responsible for collecting water. This takes time away from work, school and caring for family. The lack of water and sanitation locks women in a cycle of poverty. 

Empowering women is critical to solving the water crisis. When women have access to safe water at home, they can pursue more beyond water collection and their traditional roles. They have time to work and add to their household income. 

Learn how the water crisis affects women >

Women and children bear the primary responsibility for water collection.

A health crisis

The water crisis is a health crisis. More than 1 million people die each year from water, sanitation and hygiene-related diseases which could be reduced with access to safe water or sanitation. Every 2 minutes a child dies from a water-related disease. Access to safe water and sanitation contributes to improved health and helps prevent the spread of infectious disease. It means reduced child and maternal mortality rates. It means reduced physical injury from constant lifting and carrying heavy loads of water. Now more than ever, access to safe water is critical to the health of families around the world.

Read why the water crisis is a health crisis >

A children's and education crisis

Children are often responsible for collecting water for their families. This takes time away from school and play. Access to safe water and sanitation changes this. Reductions in time spent collecting water have been found to increase school attendance, especially for girls. Access to safe water gives children time to play and opportunity for a bright future.

See how the water crisis affects children and their education >

Reductions in time spent collecting water increases school attendance, especially for girls.

An economic crisis

Time spent gathering water or seeking safe sanitation accounts for billions in lost economic opportunities. $260 billion is lost globally each year due to lack of basic water and sanitation. Access to safe water and sanitation at home turns time spent into time saved, giving families more time to pursue education and work opportunities that will help them break the cycle of poverty.

Learn more about how the water crisis is an economic crisis >

A climate crisis

Water is the primary way in which we will feel many of the effects of climate change. Millions of families in poverty live in regions where water access is limited, temporary, or unstable. They are less prepared to face the effects of climate change like temperature extremes, floods, and droughts. Access to sustainable safe water and improved sanitation solutions can support climate resiliency for the people who need it the most.

Read more about the connection between climate change and water access >

By 2025, 50% of the world’s population is projected to live in water-stressed areas as a result of climate change, with low-income families bearing the greatest burden of this crisis.

• World Health Organization and UNICEF. (2023). Progress on Household Drinking Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene 2000-2022: Special focus on gender.
• World Health Organization and UNICEF. (2020). Progress on Drinking Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene in Schools: Special focus on COVID-19.
• UN-Water. (2019). Policy Brief on Climate Change and Water.
• World Health Organization and UNICEF. (2020). State of the World's Sanitation: An urgent call to transform sanitation for better health, environments, economies and societies.
• Hutton, G., and M. Varughese. (2020). Global and Regional Costs of Achieving Universal Access to Sanitation to Meet SDG Target 6.2.
• World Health Organization. (2019). Burden of disease attributable to unsafe drinking-water, sanitation and hygiene.
• World Health Organization, UNICEF, and World Bank. (2022). State of the world’s drinking water: an urgent call to action to accelerate progress on ensuring safe drinking water for all.
• WaterAid. (2021). Mission-critical: Invest in water, sanitation and hygiene for a healthy and green economic recovery.

The water crisis affects millions around the world. Make an impact today.

Home — Essay Samples — Environment — Water Scarcity — Water Crisis: Understanding the Causes and Seeking Solutions

Water Crisis: Understanding The Causes and Seeking Solutions

• Categories: Environmental Issues Water Scarcity

About this sample

Words: 1019 |

Published: Jan 28, 2021

Words: 1019 | Pages: 2 | 6 min read

Table of contents

Causes of the water crisis, consequences of the water crisis, seeking solutions to the water crisis.

• Invest in water storage, distribution, and treatment infrastructure.
• Implement smart technologies for monitoring and controlling water usage.
• Promote efficient water allocation and pricing mechanisms.
• Encourage farmers to adopt precision agriculture techniques.
• Promote the use of drought-resistant crop varieties.
• Implement efficient irrigation systems, such as drip irrigation.
• Reduce excessive use of fertilizers and pesticides.
• Promote water conservation at the individual and community levels.
• Fix water leaks and encourage the use of low-flow appliances.
• Educate the public on water-saving habits.
• Invest in advanced wastewater treatment facilities.
• Implement stricter regulations on industrial and agricultural wastewater discharge.
• Promote the recycling and reuse of treated wastewater (water reclamation).
• Reduce greenhouse gas emissions through sustainable energy sources.
• Support afforestation and reforestation efforts to maintain water catchment areas.
• Develop and implement climate-resilient water management strategies.
• ABC News. (2019). Chennai's the latest city to have almost run out of water, and other cities could follow suit. Retrieved from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-06- 22/chennais-telling-the-globe-a-story-about-water-scarcity/11229084
• Ceranic, I. (2018). Perth rainfall is higher than Melbourne, Hobart, London despite reputation for sunny beaches. Retrieved from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018- 04-24/perth-rainfall-higher-than-melbourne-hobart-and-london/9688142
• Green Water Plumbing. (2019). Water Crisis: Is Australia Running Out of Water? Retrieved from https://www.greenplanetplumbing.com.au/water-crisis-is- australia-running-out-of-water/
• Juneja, P. (n.d.). The Economic Impact of Cape Town’s Water Crisis. Retrieved from https://www.managementstudyguide.com/economic-impact-of-cape-town-water- crisis.htm
• Qureshi, M. E.; Hanjra, Munir A.; Ward, J. (2013). Impact of water scarcity in Australia on global food security in an era of climate change. Food Policy, 38:136-145. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.foodpol.2012.11.003
• Thirumurthy, P. The News Minute. (2019). Chennai water crisis: Schools closes down for junior classes, others declare half-day. Retrieved from https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/chennai-water-crisis-school-closes-down- junior-classes-others-declare-half-day-103919
• United Nations. (2014). Water for Life Decade: Water scarcity. Retrieved from https://www.un.org/waterforlifedecade/scarcity.shtml
• Wright, I. (2017). This is what Australia’s growing cities need to do to avoid running dry. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/this-is-what-australias-growing-cities- need-to-do-to-avoid-running-dry-86301
• Lakshmi, K. (2019). Chennai’s Day Zero: It’s not just meteorology but mismanagement that’s made the city run dry. Retrieved from https://www.thehindu.com/sci- tech/energy-and-environment/chennais-day-zero-its-not-just-meteorology-but- mismanagement-thats-made-the-city-run-dry/article28197491.ece

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Why Is Water So Important? Here’s What You Need to Know

How water works in your body, how much water do you need, how to stay hydrated.

Water is a major component of your body, accounting for 50–60% of your total weight. It is vital for many important body functions, from flushing out waste to lubricating your joints.

Your body constantly loses water throughout the day through urinating, sweating, and breathing. You should consume enough water from foods and beverages daily to prevent dehydration .

This article covers research-backed reasons why your body needs water and how much you need each day.

Klaus Vedfelt / Getty Images

All body cells, organs, and tissues require water to function. Generally, a person can only survive without water for a few days.  

It Maintains a Normal Body Temperature

Water regulates our internal temperature by distributing heat throughout the body and cooling it through perspiration (sweat).

When the body becomes too hot, it loses water through sweat . The evaporation of sweat from the skin cools the body, keeping its temperature within a normal range.

If a person becomes dehydrated, they can't produce enough sweat to cool their body. This can cause the body's temperature to reach dangerous levels, leading to heat stroke .

Avoid dehydration by drinking plenty of water if you're working outside or sweating more than usual.

It Protects Your Joints, Spinal Cord, and Other Tissues

Water acts as a lubricant in the mouth (through saliva ) and the eyes (through tears) to help prevent dryness. It's necessary to produce synovial fluid , which lubricates, cushions, and protects the joints.

Water also helps protect the spinal cord and prevents injuries by increasing tissue flexibility and elasticity.

It Transports Nutrients and Gets Rid of Waste

As a major component of blood, water helps transport nutrients and oxygen to cells throughout the body. Water also helps carry waste from the body for excretion through perspiration, urination, and bowel movements.

The kidneys need water to effectively filter waste from the blood and flush it from the body as urine. Staying adequately hydrated helps prevent kidney stones and urinary tract infections (UTIs) , which can harm the kidneys.

Prevents Dehydration

Drinking water daily can help prevent dehydration, a condition that occurs when you lose more fluids than you absorb.

Early signs of dehydration include:

• Feeling thirsty
• Dark-colored urine
• Urinating less than usual

Because water is involved in so many body functions, dehydration can eventually cause life-threatening symptoms, including:

• Rapid breathing
• Rapid heartbeat
• Inability to urinate

People who exercise in the heat, work outdoors, or have certain health conditions that cause them to urinate or sweat more than usual are at a greater risk of dehydration.

It Aids Digestion

Your saliva is primarily made up of water. Saliva is a digestive juice that moistens food, allowing it to move easily through the esophagus into your stomach. Saliva also contains enzymes that help break down starches in food.

As the digestive process continues, water helps break down food, allowing your body to absorb nutrients. Water also makes bowel movements easier.

It Protects Against Chronic Illness and Boosts Longevity

Adequate hydration is linked to healthy aging and longevity. One potential reason for this is that decreased water intake can lead to higher sodium concentrations in the blood, which raises the risk of chronic disease.

Studies suggest that adults who stay hydrated are healthier and less likely to develop chronic diseases, including heart and lung disease . Well-hydrated adults also seem to live longer than adults who don't consume enough fluids.

It Improves Mood and Cognitive Function

Dehydration may cause fatigue and confusion and may be linked to symptoms of anger and depression. In a small study, it was linked to poor cognitive function, potentially affecting attention span and working memory.

One study of young adults looked at the effects of water on cognitive performance and mood after 12 hours of water restriction. Researchers found that 200 milliliters of water improved thirst, anger, fatigue, and overall mood. However, 500 milliliters was optimal, improving mood and cognitive performance.

The amount of water you need depends on several factors, including age, sex, activity level, and health status.

For healthy individuals, the adequate daily water intake is around 11.5 cups for women and about 15.5 cups for men. This includes fluids consumed from all foods and beverages.

Experts estimate that most people get around 20% of their daily water intake from food. This means women should drink about 9 cups of fluid daily, while men should aim for 13 cups to maintain adequate hydration.

People who live in warmer climates, are more physically active, or are experiencing an illness that causes fever and/or diarrhea or vomiting have increased fluid needs.

One easy way to see if you are properly hydrated is to check the color of your urine. If you are drinking enough water, your urine will be pale yellow. If it is dark, you may need to increase your consumption.

Individuals with heart failure or kidney disease may need to limit their fluid intake.

Can You Drink Too Much Water?

Drinking too much water can lead to water intoxication or overhydration, which occurs when the kidneys cannot flush out excess water. This can cause a medical emergency due to decreased sodium concentrations in the blood ( hyponatremia ). To avoid water intoxication, do not drink more than 48 ounces, or six cups, per hour.

If you find it challenging to stay hydrated, here are some helpful tips to keep in mind:

• Keep a reusable water bottle with you and refill it throughout the day
• Choose water or sparkling water instead of sugary beverages
• When you feel thirsty, drink water
• Change things up by squeezing fresh lemon or lime into your water or adding a few berries or cucumber slices
• Snack on water-rich fruits and vegetables , including watermelon, cantaloupe, lettuce, and celery, throughout the day
• Keep track of your water intake by using a water tracker app
• Drink water with all meals

Water is vital for your health. It is necessary for temperature regulation, digestion, nutrient absorption, and body waste removal. Drinking water daily can prevent dehydration, a condition that can cause mood and memory problems, constipation, and kidney stones.

People who work in high temperatures, exercise at high intensities, or are sick are at a greater risk of dehydration. Talk to a healthcare provider or registered dietitian to determine the right amount of water for you.

Zhou HL, Wei MH, Cui Y, et al. Association between water intake and mortality risk-evidence from a national prospective study .  Front Nutr . 2022;9:822119. doi:10.3389/fnut.2022.822119

Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. How much water do you need?

MaineDOT. The importance of hydration .

Johns Hopkins Medicine. Dehydration and heat stroke .

Lorenzo I, Serra-Prat M, Yébenes JC. The role of water homeostasis in muscle function and frailty: a review .  Nutrients . 2019;11(8):1857. doi:10.3390/nu11081857

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Water and healthier drinks .

National Kidney Foundation. 6 tips to be "water wise" for healthy kidneys .

MedlinePlus. Dehydration .

National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. Your digestive system & how it works .

National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. Eating, diet, & nutrition for constipation .

National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. Good hydration linked to healthy aging .

Zhang J, Zhang N, He H, et al. Different amounts of water supplementation improved cognitive performance and mood among young adults after 12 h water restriction in Baoding, China: a randomized controlled trial (RCT) .  Int J Environ Res Public Health . 2020;17(21):7792. doi:10.3390/ijerph17217792

National Kidney Foundation. The dos and don'ts of fluid management for kidney disease .

MedlinePlus. Heart failure .

Joo MA, Kim EY. Hyponatremia caused by excessive intake of water as a form of child abuse .  Ann Pediatr Endocrinol Metab . 2013;18(2):95-98. doi:10.6065/apem.2013.18.2.95

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Heat stress: hydration .

By Lindsey DeSoto, RD, LD Lindsey DeSoto, RD, is a registered dietitian specializing in nutrition and health and wellness content.

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Writing an Essay on Water: Outline, Topics, & Samples

Environmental problems will stay a burning issue for a long time!

Well, they already are. Global warming is getting worse, the ozone layer is becoming thinner, and water worldwide – more polluted.

In this article, we are considering one of the most sensitive subjects. We discuss water pollution and shortage.

You will have a clear idea of how and what to write in your water pollution essay. Also, we’ll provide you with a set of great topics and essay examples for inspiration. Get down to reading now and get the highest score!

• 👣 Essay on Water Writing Guide
• 💧 5 Water Essay Prompts
• 🌊 130 Water Essay Topics
• 📝 2 Water Essay Samples

👣 Essay on Water: Writing Guide

We all know very well that it’s crucial to save water. But how to elaborate on this thought in a water essay most properly?

In this section, we are analyzing the structure of your future essay step-by-step. Having a plan will make the process very simple, we promise!

Essay on Water – Step 1: Choose the Topic

The water pollution subject is pretty broad, although it’s only a part of an environmental topic. You have a vast field for creativity.

For instance, you can write about the environment, nature, and natural resources. It’s easy to find something unexplored there. A much more challenging task is to come up with an authentic topic .

Here are the tips on formulating a good topic for an essay on water pollution:

• Avoid trite mainstream.
• Put your topic in the form of a question.
• Conduct a mini-research to make sure there is relatable information on your case.
• Estimate its relevance.
• Add some specifying context.

Now, look at these two examples of water essay topics.

✘ How not to do:

There was more water in the medieval period because people rarely washed.

✓ How to do:

How did the use of water change over time, and what is the water crisis we face today?

Essay on Water – Step 2: Research

With any written assignment, you are supposed to state an opinion or draw solid arguments. To accomplish it, you are going to need some foundation.

The fundamental constituent of a water essay (or any other paper) is relatable data. Choosing trustworthy sources with quality information makes you able to speak on your topic

At the same time, unreliable sources decrease your work level.

We don’t want it to happen!

So, here’re the examples of websites where you can find all the information you need:

Essay on Water – Step 3: Outline

Now, let’s make out how the water pollution research paper or essay should be structured.

• An introduction with a catchy hook, a clearly defined problem, and background information. The first thing for you to consider is how to introduce your topic to the readers. It is crucial to attract readers’ attention from the very beginning.
• A thesis statement is another part that should be included in your introduction. It’s a central idea of your essay: a brief but consistent claim of an issue. Check out our free thesis-maker to get an excellent thesis statement.
• A literature review. You will especially need it if you’re working on a research paper. Make a small digest of what has already been written on your topic.
• Solid arguments . Make sure they are valuable and go along with the thesis statement. Keep in mind that all arguments have to be backed up with reliable proof.
• A conclusion is a final touch . It should address the problem in the introduction and cover it up logically.

Essay on Water – Step 4: Write

Alright, you have analyzed the sources and created a draft of your essay on water. Still don’t know what to start with?

When you define your topic and thesis statement, move on with writing arguments. As we have said, they are the pillars of your work. After it’s done, you can switch to the introduction and conclusion

Remember that each case is individual. The only universal piece of advice is: proofread everything you write at each stage. Make sure you follow the logical structure and don’t make critical mistakes.

💧 Water Essay Prompts

Realizing the vastness of the subject opens up a perspective of options. Let’s get straight to the point!

Below, you can see the topics that can be used in the essay on water.

Water Pollution Essay

Here we elaborate on themes you can touch upon in the water pollution research paper.

• Highlight the global acuteness of the water pollution problem: draw the facts that prove that pollution is rapidly spreading.
• Speak on the contaminants: what substances make water polluted?
• Name some industrial factors contributing to water pollution. Check out the information about the most contaminating plants.
• Mention the sewage issue: there’s a lot of information on how they impact water resources in some countries.
• Tell about nutrients and what effects they have on the water. Show their connection to the eutrophication subject.
• It also makes sense to discuss different kinds of water contamination, its effects on human health, and measures that are being taken to improve the critical situation.

Importance of Water Essay

• Everything on Earth needs water to function: plants, human beings, mushrooms, insects, animals – for all of them, water is vital.
• Speak on how the natural cycle is essential. For example, biological processes allow water to circulate in the world – without them, there wouldn’t be enough water for living.
• Destroy a myth about the abundance of water in the world. Fresh drinking water is minimal.
• Mention the connection of water with oxygen and weather conditions.

Water Cycle Essay

• It’s good to introduce your readers to the essence of the water cycle. What is it? The water cycle means that water is circulating between the atmosphere and all the water reservoirs.
• How does it happen? Define and explain the main constituents of the process: evaporation, transpiration, and sublimation . Water on Earth turns into gas when it gets heated by the sun. The next stage includes vaporization. This process is non-stopping.
• Condensation is another part of the hydrologic cycle. It’s the phenomenon when vapor turns back into a liquid state.
• Finally, reveal the essence of precipitation. Your readers want to know how rain occurs.

Water Scarcity Essay

• Water scarcity is the shortage of drinking water available. The problem is enormous and brings damage to millions and millions of people globally.
• Water stress can lead to such negative consequences as deterioration, droughts, and depletion. Plants and agriculture suffer badly from these factors.
• Why does it happen? There are two significant reasons: intense water usage due to overpopulation and lack of sufficient freshwater reservoirs.
• Tell about preventive measures that help stop or slow the process down. For example, introduce eco-friendly habits, search for new water resources, and build strategies to slow down global warming.

Mineral and Water Function Essay

• Our health directly depends on what we consume. To support our well-being, we need to get enough high-quality fresh water and minerals.
• The most vital minerals for our body are zinc, magnesium, iron, and calcium. They contribute to our teeth health, muscles and blood condition, and other factors.
• The presence of nutrients in the water means a lot to the human body. Due to water contamination, we might lack the necessary minerals, which leads to various dysfunctions.
• It is essential for water to be filtered appropriately to make it drinkable and healthy.

🌊 130 Topics for an Essay about Water

If you have any difficulties choosing an essay subject, we’ve prepared this set of topics. We guarantee they are relatable, acute, and fruitful to discuss!

• Elaborate on the importance of the water cycle: How it affects life on the planet.
• Water resources in the United Arab Emirates.
• Magical 80%: What is the general meaning of water for the human body?
• Soft drinks country market in Kenya: Marketing plan.
• Classify the most water contaminating industries in the world.
• Is bottled water better and safer than tap water?
• How does the lack of minerals affect our body condition?
• Aseptic packaging lines in the food and drink industry: Analysis.
• Plain soap and water or antibacterial soap: Which is better?
• Why in the 21st century is there still an issue of ill-curated sewage?
• Wastewater treatment using membrane filtration.
• Water is life: Compare the impact of the high and low-quality water.
• Women involvement in water management.
• Write a five-paragraph essay on water wars in Africa.
• How to protect the Egypt Nile River from pollution?
• The water cycle: Reveal in detail how the precipitation occurs.
• What is the connection between our health and water quality?
• Describe the importance of nutrients contained in the water for the human body.
• Jeddah floods and adaptation strategies in the City of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
• What health dysfunctions can low-quality water cause?
• Water distribution system in Virginia state.
• The role of nutrition science and water in gastronomy.
• Describe in detail the essence and process of the hydrological cycle.
• Flooding due to urban development.
• Speak on the interrelation between global warming and the water crisis?
• Connection between asthma, respiratory disease, and climatic variables.
• Describe measures that people can take to avoid water shortage.
• Is switching off the tap while brushing teeth reasonable?
• Canada and the future of water.
• How can the authorities get information about the water crisis?
• The water-energy-food nexus and problem mitigation.
• Describe and analyze different kinds of water contamination.
• Food security promotion: Energy, water, and food.
• Use of natural products and mineral water for osteoarthritis treatment.
• What methods of water purification do you know?
• What would be the consequences if we ran out of water?
• Tell about the most dangerous substances that poison water.
• Victorian desalination project: Building and process.
• What do such diseases like cholera have to do with the water crisis?
• How nutrition and water drinking is related to fitness.
• Methodologies in wastewater minimization.
• Deterioration and depletion: Which problems are hidden under these terms?
• In Arizona, collaboration averts water disaster.
• Droughts issue: Why is it bad that desserts become larger?
• Challenges faced by the Victorian Desalination water plant.
• Why is water so vital for all living creatures?
• What role does water play in maintaining human health?
• Sweat analysis: A painless alternative to real-time vital signs.
• Reveal how the instant growth of the population affects water quantity.
• Victorian Desalination Project: Water management strategy in Australia.
• Does it make sense to take a shower instead of a bath?
• Can hot water freeze faster than cold water?
• Water wars: Speak on the problem different societies face to water shortage.
• How important for people is the right to water?
• How does agriculture suffer from water shortage?
• Oil exploration effects on soil and underground water.
• Why can’t we just obtain enough freshwater out of glaciers?
• Recycling gray-water as a water conservation effort.
• Speak on the problem of acid rain.
• Analyze the problem of water in your home region.
• What impact do pesticides have on freshwater quality?
• The shortage of water and human population growth.
• Do washing machines and dishwashers save or waste water?
• Water-energy-food nexus in the Himalayan region.
• Can rainwater be collected for usage?
• Water distribution system in Maryland.
• How to avoid the risk of cardiovascular diseases by consuming good quality water?
• Solar ponds in sea water desalination: Feasibility study.
• Describe the simplest methods of water conservation.
• Water pollution is a problem we need to face.
• Share your opinion on water conservation: Why is it essential?
• Molybdenum in ground waters in carbonate aquifers.
• Should the government start controlling the use of pesticides more?
• Western Water Corporation’s management analysis.
• Why do business owners fail to provide proper disposal facilities?
• Soft-path water management study in Abu Dhabi.
• Why is it so important to drink at least two liters of water daily?
• Global warming and rapidly rising sea levels.
• Tell about the composition and qualities of water.
• Water resources: Their beneficial uses.
• How is the importance of water presented in different cultures and art?
• Ocean wave energy technologies.
• Write about the different states of water: Liquid, ice, and vapor.
• Climate change and its impact on freshwater.
• Speak on the ways to conserve water outside.
• Acid rain: Definition and causes.
• What methods of water conservation work in agriculture?
• Role of water in human health.
• Water resources and water quality problems in Sabah.
• Describe the essence and process of groundwater absorption.
• Healthcare: Salmonella enteritidis.
• How does humanity use water for electricity?
• Oil-water-gas flows: An experimental system.
• Has the hydrological cycle changed over the years, and why?
• Water drinking patterns in eating disorders .
• How do the cleanup technologies for water function?
• Oil leaks as a massive factor in seawater pollution.
• How is the drinking water produced and transported?
• Comparison of water-soluble vitamin C levels in different vegetables .
• A proverb in English says: “Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink.” How can we interpret it?
• Water shortage and contamination in South Florida.
• What industries use water for their producing activities?
• Acid rain: Effects and reduction.
• Explore the phenomenon of floods: How does it happen?
• The importance of water in hand hygiene and hand washing .
• Are there any ways we can reuse water?
• What are mineral water companies’ marketing strategies?
• Why do children and women especially suffer from water issues?
• Absorption of food and water in the digestive system.
• Eutrophication: What is it, and why is it so bad?
• Dubai electricity and water authority: Case study.
• How do invasive species contribute to water shortage?
• Water as a source of antimicrobial-resistant bacteria in India.
• What water protection programs exist now?
• Water supply system: Maryland.
• Describe the methods and models of water research.
• Hepatitis A as a water-borne disease.
• Why is the high concentration of nutrients disastrous?
• Comparison of microbiological water quality standards for swimming beaches.
• Can we catch diseases from water while swimming?
• Can plastic use reduction contribute to saving water?
• Sustainable water management: An example from Amsterdam, Netherlands.
• What are the proper methods of disposing of waste?
• Acid rain’s effect on plant growth.
• How does water affect the climate and weather?
• Water depletion causes overview.
• Life on Mars: Analyze the information about water on Mars.
• Poor sanitation in slum areas: Effects on water and health .
• What are the regions that suffer from water scarcity most of all?
• Water supply and the plumbing system in California.

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Are you sure that the water you consume every day is of decent quality? Water contamination is one of the most acute ecological problems. People just prefer not to discuss it much. But that doesn’t mean this issue will disappear one day. On the contrary, the situation is getting worse and needs immediate decisions. One thing is clear: water is vital for the whole planet. And we should never forget about it The list of reasons why water becomes polluted is vast. They include ill-curated sewage, pesticides, acid rain, industrial waste, and many others. Have you ever noticed people throwing litter on the streets or in rivers? Probably, you have. It happens all the time, which is one of the reasons we might run out of freshwater. There are also many other factors leading to low water quality. Industrial waste plays a starring role in this process. For many factories and plants, it’s “too expensive” to build qualitative disposal facilities. That’s why they barbarically use rivers and lakes to get rid of waste. Several massive catastrophes took place just this year. Oil leaks occurred in the Gulf of Mexico, and it was no good for the environment, indeed. Such cases should bring us to take measures. It’s clear that humanity very likely might face a severe water crisis globally. We need to invent methods of water purification and find new sources of water. But we also must try to protect the water we have from contamination.

How Can Failing to Conserve Water Contribute to Greater Water Contamination Essay

More than a billion people all over the world suffer from water shortages. Even more, they are risking their health by consuming low-quality water. Others just irresponsibly use tons of water in vain causing endless water waste. Such a state of things can lead to a fatal outcome for everything that lives on the planet. If we don’t learn to spare water, we won’t be able to exist at all. Humanity keeps exploiting water resources intensely. With overpopulation, the question of water scarcity became even more acute. Each year our current freshwater resources become dirtier due to contaminants of all kinds. There is water conserved in ice sheets and glaciers, but it’s not accessible yet. Water conservation is the sensible use of water. It includes various techniques that make this process possible. In times of growing water crisis, it’s vital to be aware of this concept and its methods. The decision to this problem is spreading awareness of the ways to save water. Such simple things as turning off faucets, taking showers instead of baths, using water sparingly can help. The government should control pesticides and oblige factory owners to construct advanced disposal facilities on a larger scale. There’s a proverb in Hindi saying that there are both lotuses and crocodiles in the water. One of humanity’s most significant challenges and goals is to make water free of “crocodiles”: waste, litter, pesticides, and other contaminants.

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• Water Scarcity Essay

Essay on Water Scarcity

Water is the basic necessity of every human being, but water scarcity is a major issue that is rising very rapidly in India nowadays. The problem has become so severe that in many states the groundwater has almost dried up and people have to depend on water supply from other sources. In addition, water is one of the most misused natural resources that we still waste. It is the central point of our lives but unfortunately, not our priority concern. 

Earlier, people understood the value of water and planned their lives around it. Moreover, many civilizations were born and lost around water, but today, in spite of having knowledge, we still fail to understand the value of water in our lives. 

Reasons for Water Scarcity

Mismanagement of water and the growing population in our country are the two main reasons for water scarcity. There are also a number of other man made disturbances that continue to rise. Besides this, some of the reasons for water scarcity are:  

Wasteful Use of Water for Agriculture  

India, an agricultural country, produces a huge quantity of food to feed its population. The surplus that is left, gets exported outside. 

It is not unknown that producing this much food requires a lot of water too. The traditional method of irrigation wastes a lot of water due to evaporation, water conveyance, drainage, percolation, and the overuse of groundwater. Besides, most of the areas in India use traditional irrigation techniques that stress the availability of water.

However, the technique of irrigation has changed during modern times and we provide water to plants using a sprinkler or drip irrigation.

Reduction in Water Recharges Systems  

Rapid construction that uses concrete and marbles may not let the rainwater get absorbed in the soil, but still, we install some mechanism in our houses so that we can hold the rainwater. Then we can recharge the groundwater.

Lack of Water Management and Distribution

There is a need for an efficient system to manage and distribute the water in urban areas. The Indian government also needs to enhance its technology and investment in water treatment. Besides, we should ensure optimization at the planning level.

Solutions to Overcome this Problem

Close the running tap.

 During dishwashing and hand washing people often let the tap run. These running taps waste thousands of liters of water per year. Therefore, closing the tap will reduce this problem.

Replace Dripping Taps  

In India, it is commonly seen that most of the houses have taps or faucets that go on dripping water even when they are closed. This running tap wastes up to 30,000 liters of water that nobody bothers to change. So, we should replace these taps immediately.

Brief on Water Scarcity  

Water is a basic necessity for every living being.  Life without water is impossible, not just for us humans, but for all plants and animals too. Water scarcity is an issue of grave concern these days as water scarcity has become very common. Water is one of the most wasted natural resources and corrective measures should be taken before the water scarcity situation becomes worse. In spite of being aware of the implications, not much is being done today. 

In India, and across the world, it has been recorded that about half a billion people face a shortage of water for about six months annually. Many well-known cities around the world are facing acute scarcity of water. Many facts and figures are available to know about the water scarcity problem, but what are the reasons for this scarcity? 

With the growing population, the use of water has increased manifold. The lack of more freshwater sources and the increase in population is a major reason for this scarcity. The lack of proper Water management systems and proper drainage systems in India, especially in the urban areas is a major cause too. Kitchen wastewater should be able to be recycled but due to a poor drainage system, this is not possible. An efficient water management system is required in order to distribute water in urban areas.

Another major issue is Deforestation. Areas with more greenery and plants are known to have good rainfall.  Industrialisation and urbanization are two major factors here. Due to Deforestation, and cutting down of trees, rainfall has become an issue too.

Rivers are a major source of fresh water in India. Today we see a lot of industries that have come up and all of them are mostly near the rivers and these rivers become highly polluted as a result of all the industrial waste.

Effect of Global Warming and Climate Change

Global Warming and Climate Change are also responsible for the scarcity of water. The melting of icebergs into the sea due to the rise in temperatures is a reason as to how salty water is increasing day by day instead of freshwater. The percentage of rainfall has decreased drastically these days. Climate change along with the decrease in rainfall percentage has greatly affected freshwater bodies. 

Water scarcity has become a major problem and an alarming issue these days, and we must consciously strive to work together to find some solution to this issue of water scarcity. The Indian government today has formulated and come up with many plans on how to tackle and solve this problem.

To conclude, water scarcity has become an alarming issue day by day. If we do not take the problem of water scarcity seriously now, our future generations are going to suffer severely and may even have to buy this necessity at a high cost.

FAQs on Water Scarcity Essay

1.  What are the reasons for Water Scarcity?

The lack of proper Water Management and proper Drainage system plays a major role. Many other factors and reasons can be held responsible for the scarcity of water. Some of the major reasons are Global Warming and Climate Change; Pollution of the rivers due to industrialization; Deforestation and the cutting down of trees is another reason; Reduced percentage of rainfall due to the climate change pattern; Increase in the population which leads to increase in the use of water.  Learn more about water scarcity on Vedantu website helpful for long-term.

2. What is meant by the scarcity of water?

The scarcity of water means a shortage of water and not being able to manage the demand and supply of water. Water scarcity refers to the lack of freshwater bodies to meet the standard quantity and demand of water. Unequal distribution of water due to factors like Climate Change and Global Warming. Water Scarcity is also due to pollution and lack of rainfall. Water scarcity means a scarcity due to some physical scarcity or scarcity due to the lack of regular supply.

3. What are the two types of water scarcity?

Physical water scarcity is the result of regions' demand outpacing the limited water resources found in that location. According to the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, about 1.2 billion people live in areas of physical scarcity and many of these people live in arid or semi-arid regions. People who are affected by this Physical kind of water scarcity are expected to grow as the population increases and as the weather patterns keep changing as a result of climate change.

Economic water scarcity is due to the lack of proper water infrastructure and a proper water management system or also because of poor management of water resources. The FAO estimates that more than 1.6 billion people face economic water shortages today. Economic water scarcity can also take place because of the unregulated use of water for agriculture and industry.

4.  How can we solve the problem?

Conscious awareness is required to deal with and understand the problem of water scarcity. We can start off by consciously saving water in our homes and surroundings.  Small easy steps like taking care when washing hands, or when working in the kitchen, have to be taken. The running water taps are a major reason for losing hundreds of liters of water on a daily basis. And we should be careful not to waste this water. Conscious decision to save and the need to understand the problem of water scarcity is of utmost importance.

5. How do we waste water?

Water is wasted in ways we do not even realize, in our homes and in our workplaces. When we brush our teeth, when we shave or when we wash the dishes, one of the most common things we do is to keep the water running, especially when running water is available. As soon as we begin cleaning or washing, we do not think of the water that is being wasted. While washing hands, we leave the water tap on, which results in wasting water too. Small things like these should be kept in mind and this could be our small step towards preserving water.

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• 15 August 2024

‘Unacceptable’: a staggering 4.4 billion people lack safe drinking water, study finds

• Alix Soliman

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

People gather around a roadside pipeline to collect drinking water in Bangladesh. Credit: Mamunur Rashid/NurPhoto/Getty

Approximately 4.4 billion people drink unsafe water — double the previous estimate — according to a study published today in Science 1 . The finding, which suggests that more than half of the world’s population is without clean and accessible water, puts a spotlight on gaps in basic health data and raises questions about which estimate better reflects reality.

That this many people don’t have access is “unacceptable”, says Esther Greenwood, a water researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology in Dübendorf and an author on the Science paper. “There’s an urgent need for the situation to change.”

The United Nations has been tracking access to safely managed drinking water, recognized as a human right, since 2015. Before this, the UN reported only whether global drinking-water sources were ‘improved’, meaning they were probably protected from outside contamination with infrastructure such as backyard wells, connected pipes and rainwater-collection systems. According to this benchmark, it seemed that 90% of the global population had its drinking water in order. But there was little information on whether the water itself was clean, and, almost a decade later, statisticians are still relying on incomplete data.

“We really lack data on drinking-water quality,” Greenwood says. Today, water-quality data exist for only about half of the global population. That makes calculating the exact scale of the problem difficult, Greenwood adds.

Crunching numbers

In 2015, the UN created its Sustainable Development Goals to improve human welfare . One of them is to “achieve universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all” by 2030. The organization updated its criteria for safely managed drinking-water sources: they must be improved, consistently available, accessible where a person lives and free from contamination.

The world faces a water crisis — 4 powerful charts show how

Using this framework, the Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene (JMP), a research collaboration between the World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN children’s agency UNICEF, estimated in 2020 that there are 2.2 billion people without access to safe drinking water. To arrive at this figure, the programme aggregated data from national censuses, reports from regulatory agencies and service providers and household surveys.

But it assessed drinking-water availability differently from the method used by Greenwood and her colleagues. The JMP examined at least three of the four criteria in a given location, and then used the lowest value to represent that area’s overall drinking-water quality. For instance, if a city had no data on whether its water-source was consistently available, but 40% of the population had uncontaminated water, 50% had improved water sources and 20% had water access at home, then the JMP estimated that 20% of that city’s population had access to safely managed drinking water. The programme then scaled this figure across a nation’s population using a simple mathematical extrapolation.

By contrast, the Science paper used survey responses about the four criteria from 64,723 households across 27 low- and middle-income countries between 2016 and 2020. If a household failed to meet any of the four criteria, it was categorized as not having safe drinking water. From this, the team trained a machine-learning algorithm and included global geospatial data — including factors such as regional average temperature, hydrology, topography and population density — to estimate that 4.4 billion people lack access to safe drinking water, of which half are accessing sources tainted with the pathogenic bacteria Escherichia coli .

The model also suggested that almost half of the 4.4 billion live in south Asia and sub-Saharan Africa (see ‘Water woes’).

Source: Ref 1.

‘A long way to go’

It’s “difficult” to say which estimate — the JMP’s or the new figure — is more accurate, says Robert Bain, a statistician at UNICEF’s Middle East and North Africa Regional Office, based in Amman, Jordan, who contributed to the calculation of both numbers. The JMP brings together many data sources but has limitations in its aggregation approach, whereas the new estimation takes a small data set and scales it up with a sophisticated model, he says.

The study by Greenwood and colleagues really highlights “the need to pay closer attention to water quality”, says Chengcheng Zhai, a data scientist at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. Although the machine-learning technique used by the team is “very innovative and clever”, she says, water access is dynamic, so the estimation might still not be quite right. Wells can be clean of E. coli one day and become contaminated the next, and the household surveys don’t capture that, Zhai suggests.

“Whichever number you run with — two billion or four billion — the world has a long way to go” towards ensuring that people’s basic rights are fulfilled, Bain says.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-02621-0

Greenwood, E. E. et al. Science 385 , 784–790 (2024).

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Accessibility to Safe Drinking Water Essay

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Water shortage and Food Supply

Addressing the global water shortage, environmental challenges and water shortage, works cited.

Everyone should have access to safe drinking water. It is possible to address the issues that prevent certain people from accessing safe drinking water. The people face challenges as they live in overcrowded slums in urban areas and in refugee camps. There are others who live in the rural areas of the developing countries which are greatly poverty-stricken. Unfortunately, they have no political power to ensure that their right to safe drinking water is enforced.

The leaders have neglected to provide resources for them to access safe drinking water. These people are estimated to be about one billion in the world (Global Water, 2010). International organizations are penetrating these countries and with the financial assistance of donors, they are providing resources for these people in order for them to live a healthy life. There is underground water in even the most arid areas and the government and the international community can assist by digging wells for these communities.

Food supply and water shortage are inter-related. The population has been rapidly increasing causing the demand for food to also increase. In those areas where there is water scarcity, they are not able to participate in agricultural activities. The crop life withers and dies. The livestock also die due to hunger.

There is also the adverse effect on the population. The people become weak and are not even able to participate in farming. Others get water-borne diseases such as cholera and typhoid from utilizing water that is dirty. The limited crop produce that the community could have harvested is not even harvested well due to decreased labour. It is estimated that over three million people suffer and die from water-borne diseases annually (Water.org, 2012). As the water shortage increases, there will be growing food insecurity in the world.

It is possible to ease the global water shortage especially in the developing countries. There are cost-effective ways to do it. It is not enough for the governments to provide food for the poor people but it is important to equip them with the resources to access clean water and participate in farming. This will cause them to stop utilizing dirty water for their activities. There are two main ways to address the problems.

The first is to dig wells in the rural and arid areas to aid the people to have access to water. The other alternative is to treat water and use it in the home. The increasing population in the world requires water saving measures to be applied. There are technologies available to ensure high water quality. The harmful micro-organisms and chemical contaminants are removed. The people can also be educated on efficient and safe distribution techniques to ensure the water does not become dirty.

In periods of water shortages the environment is adversely affected. When it comes to the ecosystem, there will be animal and plant life unable to survive in certain areas. The drought makes it hard to grow certain crops. Animals will travel long distances to look for areas where they can find water.

The change in the ecosystem affects the other animals which rely on the animals and crops as food creating imbalance (World Water Council, 2012). It is therefore important for governments and other international organizations to address the water shortage problems.

Global Water. Why Water . 2010. Web.

Water. The Crisis . 2012. Web.

World Water Council. Water Crisis . 2012. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2018, November 20). Accessibility to Safe Drinking Water. https://ivypanda.com/essays/accessibility-to-safe-drinking-water/

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August 7, 2024

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Impact of drought on drinking water contamination: Disparities found affecting Latino/a communities

by American Public Health Association

Long-term exposure to contaminants such as arsenic and nitrate in water is linked to an increased risk of various diseases, including cancers, cardiovascular diseases, developmental disorders and birth defects in infants.

In the United States, there is a striking disparity in exposure to contaminants in tap water provided by community water systems (CWSs), with historically marginalized communities at greater risks compared to other populations. Often, CWSs that distribute water with higher contamination levels exist in areas that lack adequate public infrastructure or sociopolitical and financial resources.

In a study published in the American Journal of Public Health , Ms. Sandy Sum, a Ph.D. candidate at the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, UC Santa Barbara, investigated the drinking water quality in California's CWSs serving majority Latino/a communities.

Ms. Sum analyzed trends in nitrate and arsenic concentrations in drinking water sourced from both surface and groundwater, using a varied set of data, including water sampling data, historical drought records, sociodemographic characteristics of the populations, measures of agricultural intensity and CWS characteristics from the period 2007–2020.

Her study found that these systems consistently exhibit higher and more variable levels of nitrate and arsenic compared to those serving non-majority Latino/a populations. She also found that instances of drought increased the contamination in CWSs serving these communities.

"Drought increased nitrate concentrations in majority Latino/a communities, with the effect doubling for CWSs with more than 75% Latino/a populations served. Arsenic concentrations in surface sources also increased during drought for all groups," explains Ms. Sum.

Nitrate concentrations in groundwater-sourced drinking water increased from a baseline of 2.5 mg/L in 1998 to a peak of 3.1 mg/L in 2018 for majority Latino/a CWSs.

In contrast, nitrate levels in non-majority Latino/a CWSs decreased from 2.1 mg/L to 1.8 mg/L over the same period. This widening disparity in nitrate exposure is particularly pronounced in surface-sourced water, where majority Latino/a CWSs show a mean nitrate concentration of 2.2 mg/L, significantly higher than the 1.2 mg/L observed in non-majority Latino/a CWSs as of 2020.

Drought conditions exacerbated these disparities, with a notable impact on surface-sourced drinking water. For majority Latino/a CWSs, drought conditions led to an increase in nitrate levels, with a 2-unit increase in the normalized drought index resulting in a 0.04 mg/L rise in nitrate concentrations for CWSs serving more than 25% Latino/a populations.

The increase is more pronounced in systems serving over 75% Latino/a populations, with a 0.16 mg/L rise. This effect is particularly evident in very small (<500 connections) and privately operated CWSs, where nitrate concentrations are more susceptible to drought conditions.

Surface-sourced water shows a drought-related increase in nitrate levels of 0.17 mg/L, more than double the increase observed in groundwater sources (0.07 mg/L).

"[The findings] are concerning when we consider that although more CWSs, about 77%, are supplied by groundwater, more people, almost 80%, are served by CWSs that use surface water as their primary source," Ms. Sum notes.

"Impending droughts driven by climate change may further increase drinking water disparities and arsenic threats. This underscores the critical need to address existing inequities in climate resilience planning and grant making," she explains further.

Additionally, arsenic concentrations in drinking water also exhibited variability under drought conditions. Drought increases overall arsenic concentrations in surface-sourced drinking water for both majority and non-majority Latino/a CWSs.

However, for majority Latino/a communities, drought leads to a statistically insignificant decrease in arsenic levels in groundwater-sourced drinking water. This trend contrasts with recent findings in the San Joaquin Valley, where drought-related intensified agricultural groundwater pumping has significantly increased nitrate prevalence by three to five times in public supply wells, highlighting a broader regional issue.

The study underscores the need for enhanced drought resilience measures, particularly for very small and privately operated CWSs serving Latino/a communities.

"[The differential] effects I found suggest that CWSs serving Latino/a communities are not mitigating elevated nitrate concentrations during drought conditions, which exacerbates existing disparities. This may reflect a lack of treatment infrastructure, resource constraints or other operational or technical differences," says Ms. Sum.

"Although I focused on only arsenic and nitrate concentrations, these vulnerable CWSs may also be at increased risk for contamination from other sources like pesticides, waste disposal sites and manufacturing plants, under stressors such as drought, floods and other natural events," Ms. Sum concludes on a cautionary note.

Future research should explore how drought impacts arsenic and nitrate levels to help understand the public health implications and guide policy initiatives for ensuring safe and equitable drinking water access.

Journal information: American Journal of Public Health

Provided by American Public Health Association

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Essay on Water Pollution for Students and Children

500+ words essay on water pollution.

Water is the most important resource for survival on a planet. It is the essence of life on our planet – Earth. Yet if you ever see a river or lake around your city, it would be evident to you that we are facing a very serious problem of Water pollution. Let us educate ourselves about water and water pollution . Two-thirds of the Earth’s surface is covered by water , seventy-six perfect of your body is made up of water.

Water and Water Cycle

As you already know water is everywhere and all around.  However, we have a fixed amount of water on earth. It just changes its states and goes through a cyclic order, known as the Water Cycle. The water cycle is a natural process that is continuous in nature. It is the pattern in which the water from oceans, seas, lakes, etc gets evaporated and turns to vapor. After which it goes through the process of condensation, and finally precipitation when it falls back to earth as rain or snow.

What is Water Pollution?

Water pollution is the contamination of water bodies (like oceans, seas, lakes, rivers, aquifers, and groundwater) usually caused due to human activities. Water pollution is any change, minor or major in the physical, chemical or biological properties of water that eventually leads to a detrimental consequence of any living organism . Drinking water, called Potable Water, is considered safe enough for human and animal consumption.

Sources of Water Pollution

• Domestic Waste
• Industrial effluents
• Insecticides and pesticides
• Detergents and Fertilizers

Some of the water pollutions are caused by direct Sources, such as factories, waste management facilities, refineries, etc, that directly releases waste and dangerous by-products into the nearest water source without treating them. Indirect sources include pollutants that infuse in the water bodies via groundwater or soil or via the atmosphere through acidic rain.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Effects of Pollution of Water

The effects of Water Pollution are:

Diseases: In humans, drinking or consuming polluted water in any way has many disastrous effects on our health. It causes typhoid, cholera, hepatitis and various other diseases.

Eradication of Ecosystem: Ecosystem is extremely dynamic and responds to even small changes in the environment. Increasing water pollution can cause an entire ecosystem to collapse if left unchecked.

Eutrophication: Chemicals accumulation and infusion in a water body, encourages the growth of algae. The algae form a layer on top of the pond or lake. Bacteria feed on this algae and this event decreases the amount of oxygen in the water body, severely affecting the aquatic life there

Effects of the food chain: Turmoil in food chain happens when the aquatic animals (fish, prawns, seahorse, etc) consume the toxins and pollutants in the water,  and then the humans consume them.

Prevention of Water Pollution

The best way to prevent large-scale water pollution is to try and reduce its harmful effects. There are numerous small changes we can make to protect ourselves from a future where water is scarce.

Conserve Water: Conserving water should be our first aim. Water wastage is a major problem globally and we are only now waking up to the issue. Simple small changes made domestically will make a huge difference.

Treatment of sewage: Treating waste products before disposing of it in water bodies helps reduce water pollution on a large scale. Agriculture or other industries can reuse this wastewater by reducing its toxic contents.

Use of environment-friendly products: By using soluble products that do not go on to become pollutants, we can reduce the amount of water pollution caused by a household.

Life is ultimately about choices and so is water pollution. We cannot live with sewage-strewn beaches, contaminated rivers , and fish that are poisonous to drink and eat. To avoid these scenarios,  we can work together to keep the environment clean so the water bodies, plants, animals, and people who depend on it remain healthy. We can take individual or teamed action to help reduce water pollution. As an example, by using environmentally friendly detergents, not pouring oil down the drains, reducing the usage of pesticides, and so on. We can take community action too to keep our rivers and seas cleaner. And we can take action as countries and continents to pass laws against water pollution. Working together, we can make water pollution less of a problem—and the world a better place.

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Decrepit Pipes Put Jackson, Mississippi, on the Edge of Catastrophe. State Regulators Didn’t Act.

For years, jackson residents endured periods of low water pressure, potentially unsafe drinking water or no water at all. all the while, state inspectors found few problems with the failing pipes that caused those problems..

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Series: No Pressure: The Warning Signs of the Jackson Water Crisis

Gurgling faucets. Broken water mains. Boil-water notices. Residents of Jackson, Mississippi, knew for years that the city’s water system was fragile. But state inspectors took little note of the pipes crumbling underground.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Mississippi Free Press . Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Beneath the city of Jackson, Mississippi, is a Rube Goldberg-esque network of pipes that brings water to residents. The system, by one estimate, is twice as long as it should be for a city of this size. Much of it has been in disrepair for years; some parts are more than 100 years old.

Underground, broken pipes have spewed water into the surrounding earth or sent it bubbling up from cracked streets. For every gallon of water that reaches a customer’s tap, at least another gallon doesn’t, according to a June estimate from the manager of the water system.

Aboveground, the symptoms of those problems have been faucets that sputtered and toilet bowls that didn’t refill. Teenagers in the county’s juvenile-detention center were sent to other facilities to shower, one official said. Hospitals that regularly lost water built their own wells. Roughly every few days, people in one part of town or another have received notices telling them their water was unsafe to drink unless they boiled it first. At times, like for two weeks in the winter of 2021, many residents had no running water at all.

But for years, state employees inspecting Jackson’s primary water system noted few problems with the distribution system — the pipes that delivered water to its customers. In the 16 years before the system collapsed in 2022, leaving roughly 160,000 residents in and around Jackson dependent on bottled water for weeks, inspectors admonished the city just a couple times about the pipes underground. They identified issues with low water pressure just once and noted high water loss a few times. But they issued no formal reprimands or fines.

From 2006 through 2021, Jackson’s inspection score from the Mississippi State Department of Health, which oversees water systems in the state, averaged nearly 4 out of 5. The few times MSDH identified major problems in Jackson, all but one were tied to its water plants, not the distribution system.

This week, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Inspector General said the state’s failure to flag ongoing problems in Jackson’s water system , including those in the pipes, contributed to the Jackson water crisis in August 2022. Over several years, the state’s inspections “did not reflect the conditions of Jackson’s system,” the inspector general’s staff wrote. As a result, they wrote, problems “were left unresolved until the eventual catastrophic failure of the system,” when the city’s main water plant finally buckled. It took weeks until the city could reliably pump clean water to residents.

The Office of Inspector General said the EPA, as the agency ultimately responsible for compliance with federal drinking water standards, shares some responsibility for the state’s failures because it didn’t make sure the state was properly enforcing its regulations. The agency said in a response included in the report that it agrees with the inspector general’s findings.

MSDH hasn’t responded to requests for comment on the report; its response to the Office of Inspector General wasn’t immediately available. But the findings aren’t exactly new to state regulators. The report, which covers inspections from 2015 through 2021, corroborates reporting by the Mississippi Free Press and ProPublica that looked at state inspections dating back to 2006.

The news outlets told MSDH this year that their reporting showed that the states’ inspections had failed to identify problems in the distribution system and to require the city to act. MSDH officials disputed the claim as “patently false,” saying its inspections were based on information provided by the city. The agency said the city of Jackson failed to take on the responsibility “to respond to any potential pressure or water loss issues.”

In an interview late last year, State Health Officer Dan Edney defended MSDH’s oversight. Still, he said he expected the EPA to tighten its rules on how states oversee water systems. “The EPA probably, after studying this event, is going to change some things in terms of how they want inspections to be, and I welcome that,” he told the Mississippi Free Press and ProPublica. Such changes, he said, would allow Mississippi “to intervene in a little bit more meaningful way, sooner.”

Such changes are indeed underway. In response to the inspector general’s report, the EPA plans to review how MSDH conducts federally required inspections. Beyond Mississippi, the EPA is checking other states’ oversight in the Southeast. And federal officials will update EPA guidance on how to perform federally required inspections to include a process for handling ongoing problems such as those that plagued Jackson’s distribution system.

Water Pressure Was Bad, but Still Passed the Test

MSDH’s inspections do include questions about the pipes underground. But time and again, the agency’s inspection records did not reflect what was going on beneath the surface in Jackson.

Every year when inspectors came, they checked water quality, reviewed records and policies and looked over equipment. They filled out a two-page questionnaire, awarded points based on the answers and wrote up pages of recommendations. On every inspection report from 2006 to 2020, inspectors answered no to a question about whether there was “any indication” of pressure problems. Only in 2021 did they answer yes, noting that a fire at a water plant had caused pressure to drop.

Edney, who became the state’s chief health officer in 2022, admitted to the Mississippi Free Press and ProPublica that this was “surprising.” As a practicing physician, he had experienced water pressure problems at Merit Health Central, a hospital located in a part of town that was often the first to lose water during an outage.

There was other evidence as well: the city’s own boil-water notices, which alerted people to problems in the system. Low pressure resulting from a line break can allow bacteria to seep into the pipes, which is why Jackson residents regularly received such notices. From August 2014 through July 2022, Jackson issued more than 1,500 boil-water notices, according to city records in the possession of MSDH, including at least nine notices that affected everyone in the city. Such notices aren’t normally reported to the EPA. But, inspector general staff wrote, “if state surveyors find an exorbitant number of boil water notices” during a federally required inspection, “the state could report the issue to the EPA.”

The Mississippi Free Press and ProPublica asked Edney how inspectors could have noted pressure problems just once even as Jackson regularly shared boil-water notices with MSDH. Edney said the state doesn’t consider water pressure to be a problem unless it’s “consistently” below 20 pounds per square inch, and Jackson often posted pressures of 21 to 30 psi. “If they’re consistently running 22 psi, then they pass,” Edney said. “That’s an acceptable low pressure.”

Though that figure might be acceptable to Mississippi, it is much lower than the standard pressure specified in a set of guidelines that the EPA recommends water systems follow. Those guidelines, produced by a consortium of state water regulators, say that a water system’s “normal working pressure” must be at least 35 psi and generally should be between 60 and 80 psi .

Both MSDH and the EPA pointed out that these are just guidelines. There are no federal requirements for how high water pressure must be; the EPA says most states set the minimum at 20 psi to ensure that firefighters have the water they need.

Ken Kopocis, who led the EPA’s Office of Water during the Obama administration, said a water system operating on a thin margin like Jackson’s did is just “one small hiccup” away from an interruption in water service or a widespread outage. “This is going to happen,” he said. “It’s only a matter of happenstance that it got delayed as long as it did.”

Massive Water Loss Wasn’t a Problem for Inspectors

When pressure in a water system drops unexpectedly, there are two likely causes: a decline in water production at plants or water loss due to broken pipes.

Estimates suggest that for years, Jackson has lost half or even more of its treated water. It was a well-known problem among the people who ran the utility. In 2012, an engineering firm warned that the rate of water loss was increasing. In 2016, a public works official estimated that Jackson was losing 40% of its water, according to a news story at the time.

Data from the city’s water plants indicates the situation may have been even worse. Between 2013 and 2022, Jackson’s water plants produced an average of about 45 million gallons of treated water a day. On a normal day, the city should require 18 to 20 million gallons, according to Ted Henifin, the head of JXN Water, the federally appointed management firm now running the city’s water system.

It wasn’t until after Henifin’s team took over the water system in 2022 that Terence Byrd, who managed one of the utility’s two water treatment plants for about five years, realized how those leaks contributed to the constant cycle of breakdowns and repairs at the plants. “Our plants were running into the ground,” said Byrd, who is now working for JXN Water, “because they were trying to pump against so many leaks in the system.”

Bill Miley, who was responsible for fixing those leaks when he served as utilities manager for the city of Jackson, said that work kept his ever-shrinking crews and hired contractors running nonstop. “I had enough to keep three crews busy near seven days a week,” he said.

The city experienced more than 7,300 breaks over a five-year period, according to the EPA inspector general, far above the industry benchmark. A former city official told federal employees that a single line break leaked 4 million to 5 million gallons a day — a total of 10 billion to 13 billion gallons from 2016 to 2022, according to the inspector general’s report. State inspectors, however, never flagged the frequent line breaks as a serious problem that warranted official corrective action.

Nor did they evaluate Jackson based on how much water it was losing. Their questionnaire asked only whether the city was tracking water loss at all and whether “acceptable” records were available for review. For all but two of 16 years, inspectors said Jackson’s records were fine.

The exception was in 2008 and 2009. The first year, inspectors noted that Jackson hadn’t provided acceptable records, which was considered a “significant deficiency,” and they told the city to respond with a plan to fix it. In 2009, state inspectors again noted the lack of records on their report. From 2010 on, MSDH’s inspection records show, the agency considered Jackson’s records acceptable.

Three current and former officials with Jackson’s water system told the news organizations that the inspection reports were wrong in calling the city’s water records acceptable. They explained that tracking water loss requires functional meters to measure how much water customers use. But in Jackson, the city’s water meters have been in a state of constant failure for at least the last decade. The city had no way to accurately calculate how much water it was losing, and officials knew it at the time.

In a written statement sent before the inspector general report was published, MSDH said that, under state law, there was nothing further the agency could have done to mandate that the records reflected reality. “There is no established and enforceable consequence of providing inaccurate water loss information,” the agency said. And there’s little chance that state lawmakers would grant the agency the authority to set a limit. The Legislature “is unlikely to support changing the regulatory environment for every public water system in the state as a result of Jackson and its specific lack of system maintenance,” MSDH officials said.

Inspectors eventually made note of Jackson’s water loss in their 2019 report, saying that city records showed that water loss was “around 50%.” The following two years, inspectors put it at more than 40%. Even then, Edney said MSDH had no authority to intervene because the state doesn’t have a limit on how much water a local utility can lose. “Maybe there needs to be,” he said.

The state’s limited approach to enforcement comes up repeatedly in the inspector general’s report. State employees overlooked some problems, and they didn’t consistently document others or escalate those that continued from year to year, inspector general staff wrote. When state employees did identify serious problems, they didn’t always notify the city and sometimes didn’t record them in an EPA database. As a result, the EPA didn’t know just how bad things were in Jackson.

A City That Couldn’t Count on the Water

The water system portrayed in the state’s inspection reports contrasted sharply with the experience of residents of Windsor Forest, a majority-Black neighborhood located far from the water plants and pumping stations.

For most of the six years that Paidra Evans has lived in the South Jackson neighborhood, she’s had trouble getting enough water to wash dishes or hose down her car. When the 2022 crisis hit, she was caring for her husband, a truck driver, as his health slowly declined. “A lot of times, when I had to bathe him on the bed, the water would be brown,” she said. “He couldn’t brush his teeth or anything. He said: ‘Baby, what is going on? Just let the water run, run, run, and then maybe it’ll get clear.’”

Her neighborhood “had been a focal point even before the crisis started,” JXN Water’s Byrd said. (As of October, JXN Water said it had transitioned the neighborhood to the city’s well system, alleviating these long-standing issues; Evans said her water pressure has improved.)

Miley, the city’s former utilities manager, was well aware of those problems. He said he knew something was wrong whenever he got a call from Merit Health Central. When the pressure dipped in the system, Merit would lose water above the fifth floor — a warning that others in the city weren’t getting water either.

Merit, which by 2015 was the only hospital in the city without its own water supply, eventually decided to pay $11,000 a month to park water trucks outside in case of an outage. The bill goes up to $10,000 per day when the hospital needs the water.

At the Henley-Young-Patton Juvenile Justice Center in South Jackson, every two months or so the water pressure would decline so severely that staff needed bottled water to cook and flush toilets, said Eddie Burnside, the facility’s operations manager. That started in 2018 and continued until at least 2023, he said.

In 2020, Hinds County installed a pump at the facility to draw water from the city’s pipes, Burnside said. But problems continued; Burnside said detainees drank bottled water when pressure dropped too low to trust what came out of the pipes.

Jordan Rae Hillman, JXN Water’s chief operating officer, confirmed in a written statement that pressure at Henley-Young dropped whenever there were significant line breaks anywhere in the city. She said it was a consequence of the facility’s relatively high elevation and the water system’s challenges in keeping the system pressurized.

Now, with the intervention of the federal government, pressure across the city has begun to increase. Melanie McMillan, Merit Health’s spokesperson, said the hospital has seen “tremendous improvement.”

That’s due to a drastic reduction in water loss, said Henifin, head of JXN Water. The city’s two plants now produce just 38 million gallons a day to meet demand, down from 55 million gallons a day last summer. “Great progress,” Henifin said; still, half of that water doesn’t make it to customers.

JXN Water has periodically monitored pressure outside Henley-Young, part of a new network of sensors across the city. The most recent measurement in February showed street-level pressure of 38 psi, just above what the guidelines recommended by the EPA say is the lower limit for normal pressure. Soon, a new jail nearby will provide well water, permanently freeing the juvenile facility from the city’s water service.

Though Mississippi regulators defended their oversight of the city’s water system, Edney acknowledged in two interviews that MSDH could do more to make sure communities have reliable, safe drinking water. When systems are out of compliance, the state will use the threat of fines to force water systems to make repairs, he said.

Kopocis, who headed the EPA’s Office of Water during the Obama years, echoed water regulators in a few other states in saying that the gaps exposed by the Jackson water crisis extend beyond Mississippi. Most states do not have water quality laws that are stricter than the federal government’s. And regulators in several states said inspectors there focus on water plants, not pipes.

That means problems like Jackson’s may go undetected before a major failure. Robert Brownwood, who works for California’s water regulator, said Jackson is like Flint, Michigan — another struggling, majority-Black city that made headlines for a water crisis beginning in 2014. “As Flint was for lead,” he said, “Jackson is the poster child for distribution infrastructure and repair.”

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In Los Angeles, Your Chic Vacation Rental May Be a Rent-Controlled Apartment

Amid an affordable housing crisis, dozens of rent-controlled buildings are listed on short-term rental websites. A 2018 law was supposed to stop that, but the city is struggling to enforce it.

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Federal Law Thwarted Chicago’s Attempt to Sue Gun Makers. But Now It Has a New Strategy.

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The Nation’s First Law Protecting Against Gift Card Draining Has Passed. Will It Work?

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The Biden Administration Says Its Trade Policy Puts People Over Corporations. Documents on Baby Formula Show Otherwise.

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Escaping Oklahoma: A Worker’s Story From Inside an Illegal Marijuana Operation

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Boil water advisory issued for over 40k residents in Cumberland, York counties

• Updated: Aug. 10, 2024, 7:57 a.m.
• | Published: Aug. 09, 2024, 9:11 p.m.

A man gets a cup of water from the tap on Thursday, June, 13, 2019. Rachel Ellis file photo | For MLive.com

• Madison Montag | [email protected]

Update : Boil-water advisory continues Saturday in part of central Pa. after water main break

Pennsylvania American Water issued a boil water advisory Friday night for customers served by their Mechanicsburg system, following a water main break.

Approximately 42,000 customers in Camp Hill, Lemoyne, New Cumberland, Shiremanstown, West Fairview and Wormleysburg boroughs, East Pennsboro, Hampden, Lower Allen and Silver Spring townships are under the advisory.

Parts of Middlesex and Upper Allen townships in Cumberland County as well as portions of Fairview and Newberry townships in York County are also affected.

The advisory comes after the system experienced a water pressure drop caused by a main break, the company said.

Pennsylvania American Water recommends bringing all water to a rolling boil, letting it boil for one minute and then allowing it to cool before use. Bottled water is also a safe alternative during the advisory. Affected customers should use boiled or bottled water for drinking, making ice, washing dishes, brushing teeth and food preparation while the advisory is in place.

Inadequately treated water could contain bacteria, viruses and parasites, which can cause nausea, cramps, diarrhea and headaches, the water company’s release said.

People at increased risk, such as pregnant women, some elderly and people with compromised immune systems, should reach out to their health care advisors about drinking the water under the advisory.

Repairs will start once Pennsylvania American Water locates the main break. The company also plans on collecting and analyzing water samples for bacteria and other contaminants.

For the most recent updates, visit www.pennsylvaniaamwater.com and click on Alerts. Pennsylvania American Water’s customer service center is also available at 800-565-7292.

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Viewpoint: A ‘rolling wave of local media stories’ claim PFAS chemicals are toxic and contaminate drinking water. What are the facts?

There was a famous commercial that asked the question, “Where’s the Beef?” This can be applied to the rolling wave of stories in local media about toxic PFAS contamination of drinking water. In these cases, there is no beef.

rticles  in a local newspaper in New Jersey and  North Carolina  demonstrate a national “pandemic” – stories describing widespread PFAS contamination in drinking water across their respective states. According to the articles, PFAS has been linked to cancer and a host of other health problems, resulting in great danger to public health.

I will focus on PFAS found in drinking water, using New Jersey as an example, and a lawsuit filed in June, focusing on the approach EPA used to develop the drinking water regulation for PFAS.

The dose makes the poison

Nearly 500 years ago, Swiss physician and chemist Paracelsus expressed the basic principle of toxicology: “All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing, not a poison.” This means a substance can cause harm only if it occurs in a high enough concentration, and any chemical, including  water and oxygen,  can be toxic if too much is taken into the body.

It is essential to distinguish between low levels of PFAS in drinking water and high concentrations in industrial releases and contamination from military sites. In cases of high concentrations, clean-up is appropriate and necessary.

However, the EPA appears to have forgotten Paracelsus’s principle in its regulation of PFAS. It has set the Maximum Contaminant Level (MCL) for PFAS, the legally enforceable drinking water standard, so low that any amount found in the environment is considered harmful. In the news article about New Jersey water, the PFAS levels found in drinking water were compared to the MCL and deemed unsafe.

How did we get here?

• In 2016, the EPA set  health advisories  (safe levels) for PFOA and PFOS (the two most studied PFAS) of 0.070 parts per billion (ppb).
• In 2022, the EPA lowered the values of those health advisories using  flawed  risk assessments, which misrepresented the scientific data.
• In 2023, the EPA, using a Maximum Contaminant Level Goal (MCLG) of zero for both compounds because they considered them “likely carcinogens,”  proposed  an MCL of 0.004 ppb for PFOA and PFOS. There is no clear evidence that they cause cancer.
• In April 2024, the EPA  finalized  the MCL of 0.004 ppb, even though it is below the level many laboratories can detect. It will cost water supplies billions of dollars to remove PFAS to this level.

“The EWG can’t tell a toxic chemical from a badminton shuttlecock.” – Dr. Josh  Bloom

Both news articles provide links to a map from the Environmental Working Group (EWG) as the source for their PFAS data. However, it is always far better to consider the original source. The data, uninterpreted by the EWG, can be found on EPA’s website:  Fifth Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule Data Finder | US EPA , which contains the analytical results from EPA’s Fifth Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule. This rule requires all large and some small water systems to sample their water systems for 29 individual PFAS chemicals between 2023 and 2025. The website contains the data received as of April 11, 2024, representing approximately 35% of the expected results.

Searching the data from New Jersey for PFOA and PFOS revealed:

• 44% of the water systems tested had an average PFOA concentration of 0.009 ppb (above the MCL of 0.004 ppb).
• 24% of the water systems tested had an average PFOS concentration of 0.007 ppb (above the MCL of 0.004 ppb).

It is hard to visualize how small these levels are.  Here  are two ways to think about it: One ppb is equivalent to one drop of impurity in 500 barrels of water, or one ppb is 1 cent out of $10 million. A level of 0.007 ppb (the average level of PFOS) is seven-thousandths of one ppb.

These levels are so low that they present no public health risk. Even the highest levels detected (0.03 ppb PFOA and 0.023 ppb PFOS) are below safe levels.

What are safe levels for PFAS? 

An independent group, The  Alliance for Risk Assessment , took a fresh look at safe levels for PFAS. In 2022, they recruited 24 scientists from eight countries to review relevant information and independently develop ranges for PFOA and PFOS safe levels. They completed their risk assessment for PFOA in 2023; a PFOS assessment will be completed shortly,  estimating  that PFOA doses of 0.01–0.07 micrograms per kilogram body weight per day protect human health. Converted to drinking water [2], this corresponds to approximately 0.07 ppb – 0.40 ppb.

Using 0.07 ppb as a safe level, both the maximum level of PFOA detected, 0.03 ppb, and the average, 0.009 ppb, in New Jersey water supplies are below the safe level, indicating no threat to public health.

Recent action by the American Water Works Association (AWWA) and the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies (AMWA) may provide a chance to redo the PFAS regulation. On June 7, they petitioned the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to review the final PFAS rule,  arguing  that the EPA did not rely on the best available science and underestimated nationwide costs.

The EWG, among other groups, is generating enormous distrust based on scientifically flawed risk assessments. From a practical perspective, if the litigation does not result in changes to the PFAS rule, in addition to unnecessary fear, consumers across the US will see higher water bills with no health benefits.

Susan Goldhaber, M.P.H., is an environmental toxicologist with over 40 years’ experience working at   Federal and State agencies and in the private sector, emphasizing issues concerning chemicals in drinking water, air, and hazardous waste.  Her current focus is on translating scientific data into usable information for the public. 

A version of this article was originally posted at the  American Council on Science and Health  and is reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit both the GLP and original article. The ACSH can be found on X  @ACSHorg

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