Save water, save life

In most parts of the world, water is a scarce re­source and un­evenly dis­trib­uted, while a lot of it is wasted, pol­luted and un­sus­tain­ably man­aged. It has been and still is the source of many dis­putes, ten­sions and wars across the globe. Ac­cess to fresh water as a nat­ural re­source pub­li­cally avail­able to every­one is often the fac­tor that dif­fer­en­ti­ates be­tween ad­vanced and un­der­de­vel­oped so­ci­eties; the fact that in the wealth­i­est so­ci­eties water has never been in short sup­ply has led to waste and un­sus­tain­able uses. Until now. Be­cause the threat of water scarcity is be­gin­ning to hover over some de­vel­oped coun­tries as well, as a re­sult of two fac­tors ag­gra­vated or caused by human ac­tion: cli­mate change, which causes reg­u­lar droughts in re­gions where they were pre­vi­ously less com­mon; and urban al­ter­ations, which have led to high con­cen­tra­tions of in­hab­i­tants and in­dus­tries with no re­gard for nat­ural re­sources, and which have di­rectly and often ir­re­versibly af­fected the nat­ural func­tion­ing of the wa­ter­sheds.

In ad­di­tion to this, water has also gen­er­ated a great deal of eco­nomic ac­tiv­ity in its en­vi­ron­ment. Firstly, for man­age­ment of the water cycle it­self; and sec­ondly, due to the con­stant need for in­fra­struc­ture to cap­ture, trans­port, treat and dis­trib­ute it. From reser­voirs to sewage treat­ment plants, the water cycle in­volves huge amounts of money.

We take a look at these and other press­ing mat­ters re­lated to drought, water stress and water scarcity in this issue’s re­port, Every drop counts, by Irene Casel­las (pages 20-27), to raise aware­ness and high­light the in­creas­ing sig­nif­i­cance of water scarcity world­wide. In short, the ques­tion be­fore us is two-fold: on one hand, whether we are in time to re­verse the causes that con­tribute to drought and in­equal­ity in the dis­tri­b­u­tion of water; and on the other, whether we can change the re­la­tion­ship that the so-called first world has with water, and be more re­spon­si­ble, ef­fi­cient and sus­tain­able in its uses. It is not just an eco­log­i­cal or eco­nomic issue, it is above all an eth­i­cal one: can we con­tinue to waste a re­source that is in­ac­ces­si­ble to mil­lions of peo­ple?