Water Scarcity Could Affect Billions: Is This the Biggest Crisis of All?
'Population growth, pollution and climate change, all accelerating, are likely to combine to produce a drastic decline in water supply in the coming decades, according to the World Water Development Report, published today. And of course that supply is already problematic for up to a third of the world's population. At present 1.1 billion people lack access to clean water and 2.4 billion lack access to proper sanitation, nearly all of them in the developing countries. Yet the fact that these figures are likely to worsen remorselessly has not been properly grasped by the world community, the report says. "Despite widely available evidence of the crisis, political commitment to reverse these trends has been lacking." Faced with "inertia at the leadership level and a world population not fully aware of the scale of the problem", the global water crisis will reach unprecedented heights in the years ahead, the report says, with growing per capita scarcity in many parts of the developing world. And that means hunger, disease and death.'

Water Scarcity Could Affect Billions: Is This the Biggest Crisis of All?
'Population growth, pollution and climate change, all accelerating, are likely to combine to produce a drastic decline in water supply in the coming decades, according to the World Water Development Report, published today. And of course that supply is already problematic for up to a third of the world's population. At present 1.1 billion people lack access to clean water and 2.4 billion lack access to proper sanitation, nearly all of them in the developing countries. Yet the fact that these figures are likely to worsen remorselessly has not been properly grasped by the world community, the report says. "Despite widely available evidence of the crisis, political commitment to reverse these trends has been lacking." Faced with "inertia at the leadership level and a world population not fully aware of the scale of the problem", the global water crisis will reach unprecedented heights in the years ahead, the report says, with growing per capita scarcity in many parts of the developing world. And that means hunger, disease and death.'