South Africa is not the only country facing a severe water crisis in the not to distant future. Emerging economies in Asia are drying out. India has already instituted water outages to manage demand in the same way that South Africa has experienced power outages. Coca-Cola has had to close plants in China due to insufficient water supply to produce their beverages.
The demand for fresh water is only said to increase and many more countries will be thrown into water scarcity. Unless industry, agriculture and household stop polluting and start recycling and reusing their fresh water supply wars will be fought over this essential resource.
This extract form Bloomberg.
A fight breaks out as student Vikas Dagar jostles with dozens of men, women and children to fill buckets from a truck that brings water twice a week to the village of Jharoda Kalan on the outskirts of New Delhi.
Three thousand kilometers (1,900 miles) away, near Xi’an in central China, power-plant worker Zhou Jie stands on the mostly dry bed of the Wei River, remembering when he used to fish there before pollution made the catch inedible.
Dagar and Zhou show the daily struggle with tainted or inadequate water in India and China, a growing shortage that the World Bank says will hamper growth in the world’s fastest- growing major economies. It also is pitting water-intensive businesses such as Intel Corp.’s China unit and bottling plants of Coca-Cola Co. against growing urban use and the 1.6 billion people in China and India who rely on farming for a living.
“Water will become the next big power, not only in China but the whole world,” Li Haifeng, vice president at sewage- treatment company Beijing Enterprises Water Group Ltd., said in a telephone interview. “Wars may start over the scarcity of water.”
Southwest China had its worst drought in a century this year, prompting Premier Wen Jiabao to say that the country would face a test to meet its grain output target. The drought affected 24 million people and 16 million acres of arable land, Liu Ning, vice-minister of water resources, said on March 31.
India’s farmers are awaiting the start of the rainy season this month after the weakest monsoon in more than three decades last year cut rice output by as much as 10 percent, according to the agriculture ministry.
To prevent water scarcity crisis with in the near future, it will become essential that all household start recycling their wash water (grey water), and when possible harvest rain water. These two solution alone could reduce a house holds water consumption by 90%. What would you do if the water stopped flowing through your taps and you weren’t able to wash or clean even drink assuming the tap water was still drinkable?
