All living things on the Earth need water to live. Yet humans pollute and waste it. More than a fifth of the world’s population doesn’t have enough water. It is likely that people will go to war over water in your lifetime.
Water pollution
If you had a bottle of water that you needed to keep yourself alive, would you pour it down your toilet? Of course not. And yet, that is just what people are doing with our water, all over the world.
Mining and other industries pollute rivers with poisonous chemicals. Farmers use pesticides and fertilizers, which are washed into rivers and lakes. In many parts of the world, people use rivers like toilets and trash cans.
Drying up our planet
Near the sea, when too much water is taken from underground lakes, seawater flows, making the water salty and undrinkable.
If you take more money out of a bank than you put in, you become overdrawn and, finally, go broke. We are doing this to our underground lakes all over the world. In West Asia, North Africa, China, India, Russia and the US, we use far too much water. Water shortage is one of the most important problems in the world right now.
The amount of water we use has increased everywhere in the last 50 years. Between 1900 and the mid 1980s, water consumption in Asia increased from 600 to 5,000 km3 a year. In Beijing, water consumption increased almost 100 times between 1950 and 1980. The crazy thing is that, even in rich countries, a huge amount of water is lost through leaky (漏的) pipes. In parts of Central Asia, the pipes are so bad that over half the water is lost through leaks.
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