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A growing number of people, inclouding Bill McKibben of 350.org, are raising awareness that the reality of climate change is being seen in drinking water supplies around the world.

“Within a decade there are likely to be 150 million restive climate migrants roaming the globe. They won’t go quietly, wherever they go. Many of them might even immigrate to Sarah’s Alaska, as the permafrost thaws.”

In October, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), issued the report “Front Line of the Global Water Crisis: Efforts to Secure Safe Water in High Need Communities”.

Well over 1 billion people worldwide depend on sources of water that are frequently contaminated with pathological microorganisms and harmful chemicals resulting in over a million deaths each year from childhood diarrhea, childhood malnutrition, compromised cognitive development, and increased risks for cardiovascular disease and cancer. These health consequences are disproportionately borne by the world’s poorest communities. A number of stressors, including population growth, rapid depletion of non‐replenishable aquifers that large populations are currently dependent upon for their daily water needs, and global warming, threaten to reduce the availability of safe drinking water in the coming decades. The solutions to the global water crises will not as simple as a technological or political breakthrough. Instead creative and sophisticated solutions are needed in a diversity of challenging contexts. Elements of effective solutions will include resource use that is ecologically sustainable over the long term, sound and appropriate technology, a financing approach that provides sustainable services, an approach that is culturally and politically acceptable, and approaches that can be scaled up to reach the hundreds of millions of households at high risk for waterborne diseases. Different approaches are feasible at different income levels. While middle and high income countries will be stressed by the global water crisis, the greatest challenges to improving water supplies are in low income settings, in urban areas with extremely high levels of environmental contamination and in rural areas where the cost of providing sufficient safe water using current approaches is often prohibitively expensive. These problems are difficult, but not insoluble. A key to addressing them is engaging the skills and creativity of a broad range of professionals. Expertise required includes hydrogeology, chemistry, microbiology, anthropology, economics, epidemiology, behavior change, fund raising and advocacy. Providing sufficient safe water to populations at highest need is a broad challenging research problem; it is also a human problem worthy of our collective effort.

Tags: climate change, crisis, drinking water, Economics, global warming, water

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