Where the Crisis Is Greater

MARY, who lives in the United States, begins her day with a shower, brushes her teeth with the water running, flushes the toilet, and then washes her hands. Even before sitting down to breakfast, she may use enough water to fill the average bathtub. By the end of the day, Mary, like many others who live in the States, has used over 100 gallons [350 L.] of water, enough to fill a bathtub two and a half times. For her, a clean, plentiful water supply is no farther away than the nearest tap. It is always available; she takes it for granted.

For Dede, who lives in West Africa, it’s another story. She gets up long before dawn, dresses, balances a large basin on her head, and walks five miles [8 km] to the nearest river. There she bathes, fills the basin with water, and then returns home. This daily routine takes about four hours. For the next hour, she filters the water to remove parasites and then divides it into three containers—one for drinking, one for household use, and another for her evening bath. Any washing of clothes must be done at the river.

“Water hunger is killing us here,” Dede says. “Having spent almost half the morning fetching water, how much of the day is left for farming or other activities?”

Dede’s situation is hardly unique. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the total time spent each year by multitudes of women and children fetching and carrying water from distant, often polluted, sources amounts to over ten million years!

Some Have, Others Have Not

So while there is plenty of fresh water worldwide, it is not evenly distributed. That is the first major problem. Scientists reckon, for example, that while Asia has 36 percent of the water filling the world’s lakes and rivers, that continent is home to 60 percent of the world’s people. In contrast, the Amazon River contains 15 percent of the world’s river water, but only 0.4 percent of the world’s people live close enough to make use of it. Uneven distribution likewise applies to rainfall. Some regions of the earth are almost permanently dry; others, though not always dry, occasionally suffer from periods of drought.

A number of experts believe that humans may cause some changes in climate involving rainfall. Deforestation, overcultivation, and overgrazing all strip the soil bare. Some reason that when that happens, the earth’s surface reflects more sunlight back into the atmosphere. The result: The atmosphere becomes warmer, clouds disperse, and rainfall decreases.

Barren land may also cause a decrease in rainfall, for a great deal of the rain that falls on forests is water that first evaporated from the vegetation itself—from the leaves of the trees and undergrowth. In other words, vegetation acts like a huge sponge that absorbs and holds rainfall. Remove the trees and undergrowth, and less water is available to form rain clouds.

Just how dramatically human actions affect rainfall is still a matter of debate; more research remains to be done. But this much is certain: Water shortages are widespread. Already, shortages threaten the economies and health of 80 countries, warns the World Bank. And already, 40 percent of the earth’s inhabitants—more than two billion people—have no access to clean water or sanitation.

When faced with water shortages, rich nations usually manage to buy their way out of serious trouble. They build dams, employ expensive technology to recycle their water, or even remove salt from seawater. Poor nations do not have such options. Often they must choose either to ration clean water, which might curb progress and reduce food production, or to reuse untreated water, which results in the spread of disease. As demands for water increase everywhere, the future looks very, very dry.

A Decade of Hope

On November 10, 1980, the United Nations General Assembly spoke confidently about the coming “International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade.” The goal, proclaimed the assembly, was to provide, by the year 1990, full access to safe water and sanitation for all those living in the developing world. By the end of the decade, about $134 billion had been spent to bring clean water to over a billion people and sewage-disposal facilities to over 750 million—an impressive achievement.

However, these gains were offset by a population growth of 800 million people in developing countries. Thus, by 1990, there remained over a billion people who lacked safe water and adequate sanitation. The predicament seemed to echo what the queen said to Alice in the children’s story Through the Looking-Glass: “You see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

Since 1990, overall progress in improving the lot of those without water and sanitation has been, according to WHO, “poor.” Sandra Postel, when vice president of research at the Worldwatch Institute, wrote: “It remains a grave moral shortcoming that 1.2 billion people cannot drink water without risking disease or death. The reason is not so much a scarcity of water or inadequate technologies as a lack of social and political commitment to meeting the basic needs of the poor. It would take an estimated $36 billion more per year, equal to roughly 4 per cent of the world’s military expenditures, to bring to all of humanity what most of us now take for granted—clean drinking water and a sanitary means of waste disposal.”

Rising Population, Rising Demand

The uneven distribution of water is complicated by a second problem: As populations grow, so does the demand for water. Rainfall worldwide remains roughly constant, but populations soar. Water consumption has doubled at least twice this century, and some estimate it could double again within the next 20 years.

Of course, growing numbers of people require not just more drinking water but also more food. Food production, in turn, requires ever greater amounts of water. Agriculture, however, must compete with the water demands of industry and individuals. As cities and industrial areas expand, agriculture often loses out. “Where’s the food going to come from?” asks one researcher. “How can we possibly meet the needs of 10 billion people when we can barely meet the needs of 5 billion and are actually taking water away from agriculture?”

Most of the population increase occurs in developing countries, where water is often already scarce. Sadly, those countries are least able, both financially and technically, to deal with water problems.

Pollution

Add to the problems of water shortages and the demands of growing population a third related problem: pollution. The Bible speaks of “a river of water of life,” but many rivers today are rivers of death. (Revelation 22:1) According to one estimate, the amount of wastewater—domestic and industrial—that pours into the world’s rivers every year amounts to 110 cubic miles [450 cu km]. Many rivers and streams are polluted from their beginning to their end.

In the world’s developing nations, raw sewage pollutes nearly every major river. A survey of 200 major Russian rivers showed that 8 in 10 had dangerously high levels of bacterial and viral agents. The rivers and water tables of highly developed countries, while not flooded with sewage, are often poisoned by toxic chemicals, including those that come from agricultural fertilizers. In just about all parts of the world, seaside countries pump raw sewage into shallow waters off their coasts, seriously contaminating beaches.

Thus, water pollution is a global problem. Summarizing the situation, the Audubon Society booklet Water: The Essential Resource states: “One-third of humanity labors in a perpetual state of illness or debility as a result of impure water; another third is threatened by the release into water of chemical substances whose long-term effects are unknown.”

Bad Water, Bad Health

When Dede, mentioned earlier, said that “water hunger is killing us,” she was speaking figuratively. Yet, the lack of clean, fresh water does kill, quite literally. For her and millions like her, there is little choice but to use water from streams and rivers, which are often little more than open sewers. Small wonder that, according to WHO, a child dies of a water-related disease every eight seconds!

In the developing world, according to World Watch magazine, 80 percent of all disease is spread by the consumption of unsafe water. Waterborne pathogens and pollution kill 25 million people every year.

The water-related killer diseases—including diarrheic disease, cholera, and typhoid—claim most of their victims in the Tropics. Yet, waterborne diseases are not limited to the developing world. During 1993, in the United States, 400,000 people fell ill in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, after drinking tap water containing a microbe that was resistant to chlorine. In the same year, dangerous microbes found their way into the water systems of other cities in the United States—Washington, D.C.; New York City; and Cabool, Missouri—forcing residents to boil the water that came from their faucets.

Rivers to Share

The interrelated problems of water shortages, the demands of growing populations, and pollution leading to ill health are all factors that can lead to tension and conflict. Water, after all, is hardly a luxury. Said a politician in Spain who was grappling with a water crisis: “It’s no longer an economic struggle, but a fight for survival.”

A major area of tension is the sharing of water from rivers. According to Peter Gleick, a researcher in the United States, 40 percent of the world’s population lives in the 250 river basins whose water is competed for by more than one nation. The Brahmaputra, Indus, Mekong, Niger, Nile, and Tigris rivers each flow through many countries—countries that want to extract from those rivers as much water as possible. Already, there have been disputes.

As the demand for water spirals, such tensions will increase. The World Bank’s vice president for Environmentally Sustainable Development predicts: “Many of the wars in this century were about oil, but wars of the next century will be over water.”

What Is the Solution?

EXPERTS hotly debate solutions to humanity’s complex water problems. The World Bank wants $600 billion to be invested in sanitation and water schemes during the next ten years. The cost of not investing may be even higher. In Peru, for example, a ten-week cholera epidemic, caused by contaminated water, recently cost about $1 billion—three times the money invested in the country’s water supply during all of the 1980’s.

Yet, despite the good intentions of those who promote them, water projects often do little to help the very poor. Growth in the megacities of the developing world is explosive and chaotic. The poor live in overcrowded, poor-quality shacks with no piped water or sanitation. Having no access to publicly subsidized water services, they must pay private vendors high prices for water, often dirty water.

Clearly, the global water crisis is complex and involves interrelated factors: shortages, pollution, poverty, disease, and the rising demands of growing populations. It is likewise clear that humans cannot solve these problems.

Basis for Optimism

The future, however, is not as gloomy as many predict. Why? Because the solution to the world’s water crisis does not rest with humans; it rests with God. He alone has both the ability and the will to solve all water problems.

That Jehovah God can solve these problems is unquestionable. He is the Designer and Creator not only of the earth but also of the waters on it. It was he who put into motion the marvelous water cycle along with all the other natural cycles that make life on earth possible. Revelation 14:7 identifies Jehovah as “the One who made the heaven and the earth and sea and fountains of waters.”

Jehovah has the power to control the world’s water. He is “the One giving rain upon the surface of the earth and sending waters upon the open fields.” (Job 5:10) Of him the Bible says: “He converts a wilderness into a reedy pool of water, and the land of a waterless region into outflows of water.”—Psalm 107:35.

Time and again he has proved his ability to provide water. For example, he supplied water for the Israelites during their 40 years in the wilderness, sometimes miraculously. “He went bringing forth streams out of a crag and causing waters to descend just like rivers,” the Bible says. “Look! He struck a rock that waters might flow and torrents themselves might flood forth.”—Psalm 78:16, 20.

What God Will Do

God will not allow the water crisis to continue forever. The Bible foretells that the time is coming when he will act in behalf of all those worldwide who wish to live under the loving rulership of his heavenly government, which will soon take control of the earth.—Matthew 6:10.

That government, or Kingdom, will bring an end to waterborne diseases, along with all other illnesses. The Bible assures God’s loyal ones: “[God] will certainly bless your bread and your water; and [he will] indeed turn malady away from your midst.” (Exodus 23:25) Moreover, the polluters of the earth’s waters will be done away with as he ‘brings to ruin those ruining the earth.’—Revelation 11:18.

All the earth will flourish under God’s loving care. Never again will people endlessly struggle to find fresh, clean water. Almighty God, who always speaks the truth, inspired his prophet to write concerning the future: “For in the wilderness waters will have burst out, and torrents in the desert plain. And the heat-parched ground will have become as a reedy pool, and the thirsty ground as springs of water.”—Isaiah 35:6, 7; Hebrews 6:18.

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God promises: “In the wilderness waters will have burst out, . . . and the thirsty ground [will become] as springs of water.”—Isaiah 35:6, 7