We must act now to avert global water crisis
UN Global CompactMar 22, 2023
Ahead of the first global water summit since 1977 a UN report released Monday says that the world is "blindly traveling a dangerous path" of "vampiric overconsumption and overdevelopment."
According to the report, 2B people worldwide lack access to safe drinking water and 3.6B don't have access to proper sanitation.
This global crisis hurts areas with both too much and too little water. In countries like the US, where water is abundant, flooding causes catastrophic infrastructure and economic damage; in other countries, a lack of clean water causes health risks on an endemic scale. As water is difficult to ship from abundant regions to water-scarce regions, the global community must come together in sharing existing analytical data to develop programs to reverse scarcity and slow overuse.
Governments and NGOs have understood the dangers of unsustainable living since the 1950s, but despite countless UN summits and White House conferences, these so-called leaders and experts have remained under the thumb of the big businesses that own them. The clock is ticking for many environmental issues, but the UN is unlikely to reverse course and implement the global action plan it's been promising for over half a century.
Talk of an impending global water crisis mirrors talk of an impending climate catastrophe — there is an "Incredible Disappearing Doomsday Effect." All too often, science remains the same, but the interpretation of data and public discourse walks a tightrope between apocalypse and hope. The truth is nuanced and somewhere in the middle — Doomsday scenarios simply haven't materialized.
There's a 50% chance that humans will be able to capture water from volatile sources in the inner solar system by September 2050, according to the Metaculus prediction community.