Water is an essential resource to almost every human activity. It is needed to grow food, to make clothes, computers, and of course it is crucial to our very survival. The growing number of water shortages around the world and the possibility of these shortages leading to economic disruption, food crises, social tensions, and even war suggest that the challenges posed by water in the coming decades will rival those posed by declining oil supplies.

If you live in a very wet place like the UK, you might be thinking that this water shortage claim might be a bit far-fetched. But consider that most of Earth’s water is ocean, which provides a multitude of benefits but is far too salty to drink, irrigate crops, or manufacture computer chips. Only a tiny share of all the water on Earth is fresh and renewed each year by the solar-powered hydrologic cycle (This is less than one-hundredth of 1% in fact). Although fresh renewable water is finite, the quality available today is virtually the same as when civilisations first emerged thousands of years ago.

Growing population numbers also means that water supply per person will drop and it is estimated that between 1950 and 2009 while the world’s population rose from 2.5 to 6.8 billion, the global renewable water supply declined by 63%.

Inforgraphic » World’s water crisis. 

If we also consider that this limited fresh water is not evenly distributed across the globe, we begin to visualise the vast water crisis facing our planet. China for instance, has 19.5% of the the world’s population, but only 7% of the global renewable freshwater. The US by contrast, has 4.5 percent of the world’s population and nearly 8% of the renewable freshwater globally. Even so some parts of the west in the US are suffering sever droughts. Some scholars even suggest that the global financial crisis was triggered in part by rising fuel and water prices in the midwest which began to escalate in the infernal hot summer 2003 where the world experienced widespread blackouts due to water shortages. This added financial worries to a great number of suburban homes mainly in the hottest parts of the United States which left households unable to cope with mortgage payments thus increasing repossessions and bursting the housing bubble. It is evident that water and energy prices was not in the minds of developers and bankers when they decided to finance and build millions of inefficient suburban homes in places like Phoenix, Tucson and Las vegas just to name a few.

Aerial Suburbia » American Suburban Sprawl Captured from the Air

As we become more and more aware that we may be using water at an unsustainable pace, the idea of water footprints-the amount of water an individual uses-is becoming more common. Water footprints can be hard to calculate, depending on how far up the chain of production you go, since everything you eat and buy used some water to produce (to feed cows for beef, for example, or to use in the factory that made your cell phone). This infographic which was produced by GOOD and Fogelson-Lubliner , gives us some food for thought and illustrates some examples of how much water is used in some of your daily activities, so you can begin to calculate your footprint and try to reduce your gallons.

To help put things in perspective, think about this: your standard trash barrel holds 32 gallons and a mid-sized passenger car-if pumped full of water-has room for a little more than 800 gallons. So, the difference in the amount of water it takes to produce a pound of chicken and a pound of beef is enough to fill almost two whole cars.

A collaboration between GOOD and Fogelson-Lubliner.

SOURCES: GOOD, Department of Energy; H2OConserve; IEEE Spectrum; The Water Footprint Network, Post Carbon Institute.

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