“The harsh fact is that we will probably run out of water long before we run out of fuel,” says Nestle Chairman, Peter Brabeck-Letmanthe on the BBC website. “Agriculture accounts for 70% of global water usage today, and . . . the need to feed the growing population of the world will put an even greater strain on already scarce water resources. . . . In recent years food and water supplies have also been significantly affected by the use of agricultural land and resources on the production of biofuels. . . . At the moment we are coping by ‘borrowing’ water supplies from non-replenishable aquifers or from water reserved for environmental needs, an approach which is clearly not a long-term solution.”

Problem is, although there’s plenty of water on Earth, less than 1% of it is drinkable and that precious resource is not distributed equally across the planet.

“For most Westerners, water is something we rarely have to think about. It flows freely from several points of our homes. It’s available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We have so much water we actually bottle it and sell it. . . . It’s almost hard to believe the statistics about water in the world,” writes Jonathan Daniel Harris on the Huffington Post. Here are some distressing statistics Harris reports:

• One billion people on the planet don’t have access to clean drinking water
• By 2025, this number could be 1.8 billion
• Over half of the world’s illnesses are due to diseases caused by unsafe water

March 22 was designated “World Water Day” by the United Nations in 1992. “In 1999 the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) reported that 200 scientists in 50 countries had identified water shortage as one of the two most worrying problems for the new millennium (the other was global warming).” This BBC report offers an overview article, “Dawn of a Thirsty Century,” and an interactive map of “World Water Crisis Flashpoints.” You may be surprised at how widespread the problem is. One of the flashpoints is America’s Ogallala Aquifer, which “stretches from Texas to South Dakota, and waters one fifth of US irrigated land.” This vital resource “is being depleted at a rate of 12 billion cubic metres (bcm) a year. Total depletion to date amounts to some 325 bcm, a volume equal to the annual flow of 18 Colorado Rivers.”

This year’s World Water Day is dedicated to the theme of water quality. The World Water Day 2010 website contains information about events “envisaged to raise awareness about sustaining healthy ecosystems and human well-being through . . . . proactively addressing water quality e.g. in pollution prevention, clean up and restoration.” The website’s FAQ page provides information about “the state of water quality on our planet,” as well as other pertinent topics and links to suggested reading materials. More distressing statistics:

• More than 2 billion tons of human and animal waste and industrial pollution are dumped into waterways every day
• 2.5 billion people have no access to proper sanitation
• More than 5 million people die each year from water-related diseases -– 10 times the number killed in wars

The April National Geographic arrived in my mailbox today. It’s a special issue devoted to the topic of “Water,” meaning fresh water, drinkable water. One article begins, “The amount of moisture on Earth has not changed. The water the dinosaurs drank millions of years ago is the same water that falls as rain today. But will there be enough for a more crowded world?” As always, the photography is exceptional, and the articles in the magazine and online at the National Geographic website describe the “challenges posed by this precious and finite resource.” Our civilization has always found enough water to meet its growing needs, another article explains, so “we have been slow to give up on the myth of Earth’s infinite generosity. Rather grandly, we have overdrawn our accounts.”

• We’re draining aquifers much more quickly than the natural recharge
• Americans use about 100 gallons of water at home each day, while the world’s poorest subsist on fewer than 5 gallons
• 46 percent of people on Earth do not have water piped to their homes
• Women in developing countries walk an average of 3.7 miles to get water
• The Tibetan Plateau supplies water for nearly a third of humanity, 2 billion people, from its snowpack and glaciers, which are melting faster than they are being replenished
• With 83 million more people on Earth each year, water demand will keep going up