According to researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ” by 2050 more than half the world’s population will live in water-stressed areas and about a billion or more will not have sufficient water resources. “
” (…) The researchers expect 5 billion of the world’s projected 9.7 billion people to live in water-stressed areas by 2050. They also expect about 1 billion more people to be living in areas where water demand exceeds surface-water supply. “
The threat is, as you can imagine, to be exarcebated by global warming and increasing water demand. Lucky us, there are solutions to both problems.
If for climate change solutions are well known – mainly energy efficiency and renewables – and their adoption heavily developped on this blog, I have to admit that I don’t delve enough on water scarcity.
Such a topic is very serious as water insecurity could, as I wrote in 2012 ” generate widespread social and political instability and could even contribute to state failure.” as a the first U.S. Intelligence Community Assessment of Global Water Security pointed out.
In our daily lives, the solutions are quite simple, as I have outlined in a previous article.
Lester Brown from the Earth Institute got a great column on TreeHugger on this very topic and its implication on food. I strongly recommend you to read it.
