Water in the 21st Century

Dr. Peter Gleick’s extensive work with water followed. He explained what the world could do to make clean water a reality for the growing population in the world.

He noted that there are over a million people worldwide who don’t have safe drinking water, a billion people (according to the United Nations which he said were “pretty generous”) who don’t have access to safe drinking water, and 2.5 billion people, or 40 percent of the world’s population, who don’t have access to sanitation services.

“That fundamental failure alone, that human problem, is the human face of this issue,” Gleick noted. “The failure to meet basic human needs for water leads to water-related diseases.”

But the water issues don’t end with disease. Gleick mentioned the environmental ramifications that have occurred with our dependence on water.

“It’s estimated that 30–40 percent of all freshwater fish and amphibians in North America are considered endangered or threatened, primarily because of human use of water for our own activities. … The population is growing and it’s growing fastest in places where water problems seem to be the most severe. I don’t know why humans like to live in hot, dry places, but we do, and we’re moving there very rapidly. We haven’t quite figured out how you connect land policy, development policy, and water policy. This is the water planet. If we didn’t live on the dry part, we’d probably call it water rather than earth.”

He reminded the audience that scarcity wasn’t the problem, that there isn’t a place on the planet where there isn’t enough fresh water for basic human needs—twenty liters a day, forty liters a day, and fifty liters a day, for cleaning, drinking, or sanitation.

He said the challenges revolve around use, like the fact that California alone could produce the same amount of food that it grows agriculturally with a lot less water and that our society should change our belief that ground water and service water are two different things. “We have to understand that’s a source of supply, not something to be thrown away.”