World water scarcity is increasing. Image: BBC via Wikimedia Commons.

Earth may be a water planet, but this vital resource is not evenly distributed. Over 1.2 billion people face water scarcity; another 1.6 billion live in areas with enough water but not enough infrastructure to carry supplies from aquifers, rivers, and lakes. More alarming is the rate of change: water use has doubled in just the last century. When ancient Rome suffered water scarcity, the aqueducts were built. England solved a water problem with the New River. Upon the 2015 culmination of the United Nations’ “Water for Life” decade, what innovations should our world pursue?

http://www.un.org/waterforlifedecade/scarcity.shtml

Building the World Blog by Kathleen Lusk Brooke and Zoe G Quinn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.