Go with the flow

Most of my mem­o­ries from school are best for­got­ten, but one thing I re­mem­ber learn­ing is that the Earth has a lot of water. Yet on this ver­i­ta­ble water world only 2.5% is fresh water, the rest, the tril­lions and tril­lions of litres of H2O flow­ing on the planet's sur­face, is un­suit­able for human con­sump­tion. We can only go days with­out con­sum­ing water and last time I looked (at Wikipedia) there are more than seven bil­lion peo­ple in the world. We need a LOT of water, every day, sim­ply to avoid dying. For­get that novel you want to write, take a break from train­ing for that sports record, put your ef­forts at be­com­ing a mil­lion­aire on hold, if you don't drink water today, or to­mor­row or the day after, you will die.

Call me old-fash­ioned, but to my mind that makes water just about the most pre­cious re­source we have and el­e­vates its re­spon­si­ble use and preser­va­tion to the level of an oblig­a­tion. A re­source we all need –con­tin­u­ously and all the time– is quite sim­ply price­less, and yet we leave the tap run­ning when we brush our teeth, wash our cars with­out giv­ing it a thought, flush our toi­lets with drink­able water and don't get me started on golf courses! I know you know all this, but it is easy to for­get the value of such an avail­able and rel­a­tively cheap sub­stance that we use all day long, every day. Some­times it is good to be re­minded about such things and tak­ing an in­ter­est is un­de­ni­ably a good idea.

Well, you have come to the right place, be­cause this month we have a whole se­ries of ar­ti­cles on the water sit­u­a­tion in Cat­alo­nia, from the ef­fects of drought on our wood­land and farm­land, to the state of the coun­try's reser­voirs and in­for­ma­tion about how the au­thor­i­ties man­age this es­sen­tial re­source. If you haven't done so al­ready, check out pages 22 to 29, which at the very least will act as a start­ing point to get­ting in­formed and in­volved with the re­spon­si­ble use of our water re­sources.

What's more, the con­se­quences of cli­mate change mean that even less fresh water is avail­able, while the un­usu­ally dry win­ter we have just ex­pe­ri­enced has made wood­land ripe for for­est fires, not to men­tion the prob­lems for farm­ers. Only 10% of the world's fresh water is for do­mes­tic con­sump­tion, 20% is used by in­dus­try and 70% by agri­cul­ture. You will see on page 54 that 50,000 peo­ple turned out in Am­posta to protest the Span­ish gov­ern­ment's water plan for their re­gion. Good on them, one way or an­other, we all have to show some level of con­cern about how water is used and man­aged.