Didn’t know it was UN World Water Day yesterday. This year’s theme is “Water and Food Security: The world is thirsty because we are hungry.” Some sobering facts about our rising water consumption:
“It takes around 3,000 litres of water, converted from liquid to vapour, to produce enough food to satisfy one person’s daily dietary need. This is a considerable amount, when compared to that required for drinking, which is between two and five litres. To produce food for the 6.5 billion or so people who inhabit the planet today requires the water that would fill a canal ten metres deep, 100 metres wide and 7.1 million kilometres long – that’s enough to circle the globe 180 times.” Yikes!
Here’s another article worth reading from National Geographic: “Demographers project that the world will add another one billion people by 2025. That means, between now and then, an additional 210,000 people will join the global dinner table every night. At the same time, many millions will achieve incomes sufficient to add more meat to their diets. Because it takes water to grow the grain to feed the cows, pigs and chickens, this means the water footprint of that global dinner table could rise considerably faster than population growth.Under some quite conservative assumptions, it could take an additional 1,314 billion cubic meters of water per year – equal to the annual flow of 73 Colorado rivers – to meet the world’s dietary needs in 2025.
That’s a disheartening prospect. Where in the world can we find affordable farm water equivalent to 73 Colorado Rivers without hastening the depletion of rivers, lakes and aquifers?”
Want to know how much water we consume when, say, drink a cup of joe? To make one gallon (3.8 litres) of coffee requires 880 gallons (3,331 litres) of water. One cup of coffee requires 37 gallons (140 litres) of water! Check out this infographic.
[Photo: Lake Baikal in Siberia is the largest freshwater lake in the world. Photo from fotopedia.com]
Sleepwalking 