Published in The Voice of Water, World Water Forum, 2000
Reaching a desirable water world. That is the term used for the worldwide process that was started in 1998 to prepare for the World Water Forum and the Ministerial Conference on Water in March 2000 in The Hague. This ongoing process will result in a Vision and a Framework for Action that should lead to sufficient and clean water availability for all the worlds’ citizens by the year 2025. In this introduction I will try to describe the complex water issue in general terms without compromising on essentials.
The only renewable and relatively stable source of sweet water is the rain that falls on the continents and that originates from evaporation from the seas. Part of it evaporates again, another part falls in inaccessible territory and yet another part is necessary for maintenance of natural ecosystems. So only a small part of annual rainfall is available for human society. As this amount is relatively stable and human population increases annually by about 80 million persons, it is obvious that the amount of rainwater available per person diminishes every year. For instance, the population increased from about 2 billion people in 1940 to 6 billion in 2000, whilst the annual accessible rainfall remained at the same level.
Read the full article from Op zoek here in pdf.
The water issue