The Importance of Water on Our Planet Free Essay Example

Water: the transparent, tasteless, odorless, and nearly colorless chemical substance that supports all living creatures on this planet big or small. It is the most basic and the most important set of atoms on this planet.

Other than the hydrating factor it gives to plants and animals, humans use it to wash their clothes, clean their dishes, use the bathroom, and to bathe themselves in. Most people don’t think about how limited their water supply is, for we are simply running out of clean water.

Water seems abundant for the world, as about 70% of our planet is water, but around 2.5% is drinkable. 2% of all clean water is trapped in ice and glaciers on both ends of the earth.

That leaves us with .5% for people, plants, and animals to use. (TEDTalk annotation here) The population of people has grown in size exponentially. In the 1900s, there were approximately 1.65 billion people; over 100 years later, there are almost 8 billion people on this planet. (https://ourworldindata.org for later) That .5% of our drinking water has to hydrate those people and countless populations of animals in order to survive. In eastern third-world countries, there are more people that don’t have any clean water to use. Some of these people drink from mud ponds and salty rivers. Relief organizations like the UN and the Red Cross (https://www.redcross.org, http://www.un.org) are trying to provide clean water resources to these people by irrigations, groundwater, or shipments from far away since 2.1 billion people lack access to safely managed drinking water services and 4.5 billion people lack safely managed sanitation services.

(http://www.un.org) That population is still growing and the ratio to human and water for that human is shrinking.

A Nasa-led study concluded that many of the world’s freshwater sources are being drained faster than they are being replenished (http://www.bbc.com). Water demand globally is projected to increase by 55% between 2000 and 2050. Much of the demand is driven by agriculture, which accounts for 70% of global freshwater use, and food production will need to grow by 69% by 2035 to feed the rapidly growing population. Underground reservoirs with groundwater are being depleted because of our water issue. 21 out of all 37 aquifers are drying up to a point where they cannot be replenished. “Jay Famiglietti, the senior water scientist at Nasa, has warned that ‘the water table is dropping all over the world. There’s not an infinite supply of water.’” (http://www.bbc.com). More water will be needed not just for our consumption, but other energy sectors in the near future will require more water to cool their productions, or to water, crops to create known foods. In 2014, water consumption per energy sector raised about 50 billion cubic meters. It is projected that in 2040 that this number will rise over 70 billion cubic meters.

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