http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/in_depth/world/2000/world_water_crisis/default.stm

The world's supply of fresh water is running out. Already one person in five has no access to safe drinking water. Click on the map to read about some of the world's water flashpoints.






http://www.gramicci.com/startsomewhere/node/6

Today, we are on the threshold of a global water crisis. Right now, approximately one third of the world’s population is suffering from water scarcity. Every eight seconds, somewhere in the world, a child dies of water-borne disease. If current trends continue, two thirds of the people on the planet will not have adequate access to clean water by the year 2025. As we massively pollute the world’s surface waters, we are mining groundwater far faster than nature can replenish it. The twin realities of growing freshwater shortages, combined with deeply inequitable access, pose the greatest ecological and human rights threats of our time.
It would be hard to exaggerate this crisis. Recent studies report major deterioration in all of Africa’s 677 major lakes, which the UN predicts could be reduced to swamps in the next two decades. Twenty-two countries in Africa are currently experiencing severe water crises. Water-borne killers such as malaria, typhoid, cholera and even the plague have returned to Africa.
Asia will soon face “untold anarchy” says a British team of scientists, as it depletes its underground supplies of water. The New Scientist recently reported on the “little heralded crisis” in Asia caused by many millions of high-tech drilling pumps threatening to “suck the continent dry.” Water tables are plummeting in Vietnam, Pakistan and India, where desperate farmers are over-mining groundwater, unable to use the 75 percent of surface waters so polluted they are unfit for human use. Ninety percent of the groundwater under China’s cities is contaminated. Seven hundred million Chinese people drink polluted water every day. Almost every country in the Middle East is facing a water crisis of historic proportion.
Mexico now depends on groundwater mining for three quarters of its water needs as massive pollution is destroying surface waters. The highly toxic waters along the Mexican/US border are now referred to as a “3,400 kilometer Love Canal” and a human-induced desert is spreading over much of the Mexican Valley. Mexico City is sinking in on itself as it drains the last of its local accessible aquifers and is moving far beyond its geographic borders in a desperate search for new water supplies. (Once the “Venice” of the new world, the abundant water sources where the city now stands were destroyed by the conquering Spanish who used slave labour to dredge the canals and drain the lakes.)



http://www.usaid.gov/our_work/environment/water/water_crisis.html




Some would ask how a planet that has 70 percent of its surface covered with water could face a water crisis. More than 97 percent of that water is ocean water. Of the remaining three percent, about three-quarters is locked away in ice caps or glaciers, and is thus unavailable. In truth, slightly less than one one-hundredth of one percent of the world’s total supply of water is easily accessible as lakes, rivers, and shallow groundwater sources that are renewed by snow and rainfall. Water scarcity is further compounded by the disparity between where human populations are located and when and where rainfall and runoff occurs. Viewed in this manner, 81 percent of total global runoff is within geographic reach for human use, but three-quarters of that comes as floodwater and therefore is not accessible on demand.