Why it's important

Water is an essential resource that more than one in six people in the world lack reliable access to, and it's about to get worse. The issue used to boil down to simply needing to purify water in areas that there was no money or energy for complex sanitation plants, however urbanization and changing weather patterns due to climate change are turning this into an even larger problem. Some estimate that 2/3 of the world's population will be water-stressed by 2025.

Why We Need It

The Mayo Clinic reports that the average healthy adult living in a temperate climate loses approximately 2.5 liters of water a day through normal daily processes. In order to be able to continue to function at a normal level, everyone in the world needs to consume at least this much water on a daily basis. Those in hot or humid climates or who are not healthy need even more water.

Besides being a necessity for direct survival, water is also needed for hygiene, which is also often tied to life expectancy. Not having clean water to wash your hands before a meal can be the difference between life and death for many people.

Finally, water is a necessity for cooking, agriculture, and a large number of industries. All together, each person needs at least 20 to 50 liters of clean water a day to keep themselves alive.

Why It Needs to be Clean

Water can contain all kinds of impurities from natural and human processes. Some sources of toxins are human and animals wastes, agricultural runoff, industrial chemicals, or simply materials naturally found in the Earth's crust. These can either be introduced to a water source directly or can be picked up as water travels through the ground. Any chemical that is found in the drinking water will accumulate in the bodies of those that drink it or that consume food that used that water to grow. Eventually, these impurities can accumulate to levels that are deadly.

Among the possible diseases one can get from contaminated water are typhoid, cholera, dysentery, gastroenteritis, and hepatitis, as well as chemical poisoning, such as the arsenic poisoning of hundreds of thousands on the Indian Subcontinent in the 1980s.

Why It's Getting Worse

Reliable access to clean water has been a major issue for a long time that we have been working on for decades, so you may ask yourself why we are saying it's likely to get worse if we don't take drastic action. Unfortunately, similar to energy demand, as the world becomes more wealthy, water demand is increasing. A study of 900 of the world's most important rivers found that over the past 50 years there has been a significant decrease in the water levels of many of them. There are a number of reasons for this, including more demand for water-intensive industries such as meat production.

There is also the problem of higher demand in areas that didn't have good access to water to begin with, such as major cities in arid areas, that are growing beyond the means of already stressed water supply systems. Finally, there is the issue of climate change causing droughts in areas that we have built up, counting on regular rainfall. Just as the rest of nature is going to have to adjust it's behaviors to account for changing climate, so will people.