Water scarcity

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Water scarcity

Water and Peace

When properly managed, water can be a peacemaking platform for long lasting cooperation

Water cooperation

Water is a growing concern in many parts of the world. Countries can improve their water resilience through transboundary water cooperation over shared waters.

Indigenous peoples are the custodians of many of the world’s most fragile and important ecosystems. They also possess invaluable knowledge about sustainability and resilience, so they have a vital role in protecting our environment.

Water and the 2030 Agenda

In 2015, the global community launched the 2030 Agenda, with 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that should be reached by 2030. Some progress has been made, but for most of the goals, the world is not on track to meet the deadline. Water can help us do better.

Water in landscapes

A growing number of people, societies and companies are discovering the power of resilient landscapes. It is still possible to shift to more sustainable practices that recharge water, restore soil health, sequester carbon, and strengthen biodiversity – but we need to make the transformation now.

Agriculture and water

How to increase the productivity of agriculture around the world through better water management.

Groundwater

Groundwater is the regulator of the entire freshwater cycle, but its invisibility makes it difficult to manage and protect.

Rivers

While we all depend heavily on rivers for our survival, many rivers are under constant threat from unsustainable human activities

Insufficient supply and inadequate infrastructure leaves millions of people in the world without water.

Source-to-Sea

The source-to-sea approach focuses on the strong connection between what happens on land, along waterways, and in the sea.

Water and climate

The climate crisis is essentially a water crisis. When we treat it as such, we get new tools to mitigate climate change and adapt to consequences that are unavoidable.

Water governance

Many of the most pressing challenges in the world are about water: too little, too much or too inferior. Such challenges can only be effectively addressed through adequate governance of available water resources.

The impact of COVID-19

The global COVID-19 pandemic has pushed millions of people back into poverty and exposed unacceptable gaps between the rich and the poor. One in three people are still not able to wash their hands with soap and water at home.

Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH)

More than two billion people in the world lack safely managed drinking water and twice as many lack safely managed sanitation, making WASH one of the most urgent development challenges.

PERSPECTIVES

Youth and water

More and more young people offer important contributions to solving the growing water challenges they are inheriting.

Human rights and water

Having access to water and sanitation has been recognized as a human right since 2010. But water is also essential to ensuring the fulfilment of many other rights.

Gender and water

To improve water governance, we need to take a close look at gender roles.

Finding ourselves without freshwater is a frightening prospect as it is a serious an immediate threat to our very existence. Unfortunately, this is a threat that millions of people around the world already face every day.

Water scarcity occurs when we cannot meet our water needs. It can happen if demand is greater than supply or because inadequate infrastructure hampers distribution. Water scarcity happens in countries, regions, and communities on all continents and affects a third of the world’s population for at least parts of the year.

When tracking the progress of the Sustainable Development Goals, the UN utilizes the term ‘water stressed’ when a ‘territory withdraws more than 25 percent of their renewable freshwater resources’.

In some parts of the world, such as northern Africa, the Middle East, and western Asia, some countries will withdraw all of their renewable water resources on a yearly basis. Sometimes, they withdraw more, sometimes much more. In extreme cases, a country will withdraw more than ten times their renewable water resources in one year, forcing them to rely heavily on non-renewable resources to meet their water needs. If no action is taken to alter this practice, these countries will face a large scale humanitarian disaster, as all water resources will eventually become fully depleted.

Water scarcity is not only about human demand. When freshwater is in short supply, entire ecosystems suffer. Rivers, lakes, and aquifers dry up or they may become too polluted to use. The world’s wetlands are disappearing at alarming rate, faster than any other ecosystem, and with them we are losing an important component of the water cycle. In addition, climate change is altering weather patterns across the globe, causing great irregularities, with water shortages and droughts in some places and floods in others.

Water Efficiency

One of the targets for Sustainable Development Goal 6 on water and sanitation for all is to increase water-use efficiency across all sectors and ensure sustainable withdrawals and supply of freshwater. If fulfilled, this would substantially reduce the number of people affected by water scarcity.

Water efficiency has increased in recent years, but data is limited, making it difficult to give global estimates. There are also major discrepancies and, in some countries, development is moving in completely the wrong direction.

Globally, agriculture uses 72 percent of all water withdrawals, according to UN figures, making it by far the thirstiest sector. Household services account for 16 percent and industries 12 percent. There are big regional variations to this, but in most parts of the world, the agriculture sector no doubt holds one of the most important keys to sustainable water usage.

Beyond that, in the face of population increase and rapidly growing urban areas, it is also important to address insufficient distribution systems, water saving technologies, reuse of wastewater, and to raise awareness about the urgency of reducing water consumption at all levels. Solid management systems are very much needed, and so is the understanding and acknowledgement that water scarcity is not a local or regional threat, but a global one that we must tackle together.