Idea

Water is essential for life. Clean and healthy fresh water is mankind’s one required resource displaying the highest growth rates compared to all other basic comestibles worldwide.

This is an apparent fact and it concerns just as much plain drinking water as it concerns water for irrigation in agriculture or for human sanitary comfort in households and tourism or for industrial use.

The principal reason for clean and healthy fresh water being so precious, is an exponentially growing world population colliding with dwindling resources – mainly in the developing world. Further reasons are ever growing expectations regarding convenience, comfort and availability in the industrialized world.

As of yet, one third of the human beings has no direct access to clean, potable fresh water. In many developing countries, fetching a far away ration of drinking water for the family is the one and only daily task for countless women and children. But even in the so-called developed world, there are increasingly recurring situations in which securing drinking water is becoming a serious, tension laden issue. Anecdotes abound on how fresh water rationing is implemented in Southern California, in Italy or Spain. And it’s bound to get worse.

The solution strategies for the upcoming squeeze are complex, but the main components will be water management – meaning a growing prudence in water consumption – and the exploration of new sources of water supply, one of them being the desalination of salty water. In its millennium declaration dated 18 September 2000, the United Nations resolved to halve the fraction of world citizens who are unable to access or to afford safe drinking water, by the year 2015.

More than 10 years down the road, we’re still not even close to fulfilling.