Drinking Water, Biodiversity and Development

Our most valuable natural resource is water. All basic human requirements, such as food, drinking water, sanitation, health, energy, and shelter, are dependent on it. The most important natural resource concern of all is its appropriate management.There is no society, economy, culture, or life without water. Water is a complicated subject because of its many uses. Despite the fact that water is a global issue, the problems and solutions are frequently localised. This guide concentrates on only one aspect of water, albeit an important one: human drinking. Many of us never consider where water comes from. It appears simply by turning a tap.This luxury is denied to billions of people around the world, whose water shortages cause disease, death, misery, and social injustice on a daily basis; women and children are disproportionately affected. Poverty is defined in part by a lack of access to safe drinking water.

Drinking water and poverty reduction

Water is directly tied to poverty. Poverty and a lack of safe water are mutually reinforcing; access to reliable supplies of clean water is essential for poverty reduction. 748 million people do not have access to safe drinking water, and 2.5 billion do not have proper sanitation.

When we talk about poverty, we’re talking about economically disadvantaged people in large swaths of the world, mostly in Africa and Asia, who rely on subsistence farming or daily wages of less than $2. In 2010, 2.4 billion people were living in this condition. Between 1990 and 2010, the global rate of severe poverty, defined as the percentage of people living on less than $1.25 per day, was cut in half.Between 1990 and 2012, the global proportion of people living without access to clean water was also cut in half, with 2.3 billion people getting access to improved drinking water. 

Drinking, bathing, cooking, and cleaning with safe water involves having constant access to and an enough supply of clean water.Safe drinking water that is less than 1 kilometre (.62 mile) away and offers at least 20 litres (5.28 gallon) per person per day is defined by the World Health Organization.Safe water for irrigation or livestock may be required in specific instances if it impacts individual human health and dignity.

The water cycle 

Water is necessary for life on the planet. Water connects the key components of the Earth’s climate system – air, clouds, the ocean, lakes, plants, snowpack, and glaciers — in its three phases (solid, liquid, and gas).

The water cycle displays the continuous movement of water on the surface of the Earth and in the atmosphere.It’s a complex system with numerous moving pieces. Water vapour rises from liquid water, condenses into clouds, and falls to the ground as rain or snow. Water travels through the atmosphere in several phases (transportation). The flow of liquid water across land, into the earth (infiltration and percolation), and through the ground is known as runoff (groundwater). Groundwater is absorbed by plants and evaporated by plants into the atmosphere (transpiration).

Solid ice and snow decompose into gas quite quickly (sublimation). The opposite can also happen when water vapour solidifies (deposition).

Realistic approaches

“Biodiversity” measures do not solve all development and drinking water challenges. Almost always, a combination of approaches is required. They do, however, provide clever solutions in more regular and meaningful ways than is commonly assumed.

Setting guidelines that are subsequently enforced by legal/regulatory measures is a frequent solution to water supply and quality challenges. This necessitates I the establishment of water quality and quantity criteria, (ii) their monitoring, (iii) the identification of those responsible for regulatory violations, and (iv) the use of regulation and enforcement to influence behaviour. There are numerous barriers to reaching goals with this strategy alone, including capacity, prices, and the legal/regulatory environment. While point-source pollution (such as industry discharges) can be discovered, the technique is extremely problematic in terms of pollution control.Nonpoint-source pollution (e.g., from distributed small-scale agricultural activities) is particularly difficult to regulate, even in industrialised countries, because it is difficult to identify, monitor, and hold offenders accountable. People are more likely to change their behaviour with encouragement and rewards than with punishment, according to experience.

Conclusion

Freshwater ecosystems are losing biodiversity at a faster rate than terrestrial ecosystems around the world: Extinction rates for well-studied North American freshwater animals are predicted to be as high as 4% each decade, five times higher than terrestrial species losses, and rates for less-studied locations and faunas could be even higher. Overexploitation of both water and organisms, water pollution, habitat destruction and degradation (including modification of natural flow regimes and invasions of exotic species), all of which are linked to human activities, are factors causing freshwater biodiversity reductions. Global-scale environmental changes, such as climate change and acidification, are superimposed over these elements. Overfishing of wild freshwater fish stocks occurs all around the world.