{"id":58805,"date":"2018-02-22T14:54:30","date_gmt":"2018-02-22T14:54:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.geoplastglobal.com\/?p=58805"},"modified":"2019-10-16T12:40:21","modified_gmt":"2019-10-16T12:40:21","slug":"global-water-management-issues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.geoplastglobal.com\/en\/blog\/global-water-management-issues\/","title":{"rendered":"Global water management issues"},"content":{"rendered":"Water is life<\/strong> and distinguishes our planet compared to all the others we know about. While the global supply of available freshwater is more than adequate to meet all current and foreseeable water demands, its spatial and temporal distributions are not. There are many regions where freshwater resources are inadequate to meet domestic, economic development and environmental needs.\u00a0In such regions, the lack of adequate clean water to meet human drinking water and sanitation needs is indeed a constraint on human health and productivity and hence on economic development as well as on the maintenance of a clean environment and healthy ecosystems.\r\n\r\nAll of us are involved to find a sustainable way to solve these issues. However, we face multiple challenges<\/strong> in doing that, especially given a changing and uncertain future climate, and a rapidly growing population that is driving increased social and economic development, globalization, and urbanization.\r\n\r\nMajor rivers \u2013 including the Colorado River<\/a> in the western United States and the Yellow River<\/a> in China \u2013 no longer reach the sea in most years. The California drought<\/a> is exacerbating the large and growing gap between the state\u2019s water use and the available water supply, while the Western Cape drought<\/a> is causing a significant water crisis never seen before in South Africa:\u00a0Level 4 water restrictions are being imposed, limiting the consumption of water to 50 litres per person per day.<\/strong> The world\u2019s water is increasingly becoming degraded in quality, threatening the health of people and ecosystems and increasing the cost of treatment. Some 780 million people<\/strong> around the globe still lack access to clean water and thousands perish daily for the lack of it.\r\n\r\n\"\"\r\n\r\nAll these issues are connected to a wasteful use of water, characterized by poor management systems<\/strong> and failure to apply existing water technologies.\r\n\r\nToday perhaps half of economically available freshwater<\/strong> is used to satisfy human demands\u2014twice what it was only 35 years ago [Young et al<\/em>., 1994<\/a>]. We are not sure how much water must remain in our natural ecosystems to maintain them; many have already been destroyed by overwithdrawals of water. Fortunately studies of the role of water in ecosystems are improving our ability to value it and to understand large scale, long-term ecosystem processes and the flows of water they require.\r\n\r\nNowadays, there’s an International Institution<\/strong> that deals with all these problems: The International Water Management Intitute.<\/a> This is a non-profit research organisation with headquarters in Colombo<\/a>, Sri Lanka<\/a>, and offices across Africa and Asia. Its research focuses on: water availability and access, including adaptation to climate change; how water is used and how it can be used more productively; water quality and its relationship to health and the environment; and how societies govern their water resources.\r\n\r\nHowever, the change must start from all of us. What can we do to improve water management concretely<\/strong>?\r\n