A safe, reliable, affordable and easily accessible water supply is essential for good health. Globally, people of many nations—or high income regions within nations—now enjoy the health benefits of vast, reliably maintained infrastructure and water management systems that pipe safe, clean water into people’s homes for drinking, cooking, washing and flushing their waste into sewerage systems. In these regions, people no longer have the responsibility of maintaining their own supply of safe water or collecting water from a shared source outside of their own house or yard. Instead, people are billed, with variable levels of efficiency and cost recovery, for water services provided by government or private utility companies.
It has been estimated that a minimum of 7.5 liters of water per person per day is required in the home for drinking, preparing food and personal hygiene, the most basic requirements for water; at least 50 liters per person per day is needed to ensure all personal hygiene, food hygiene, domestic cleaning and laundry needs. This domestic water consumption is dwarfed by the demands of agriculture and ecosystems, even in wealthy countries where per capita domestic water consumption greatly exceeds these figures. To cover all these requirements and to avoid water stress, experts generally agree that about 1,000 cubic meters of freshwater per capita per year is needed.
Nevertheless, only about 0.5% of water on Earth is usable freshwater, as most of the 1.4 billion cubic kilometers of water on the planet (70% of the planet) is seawater. Water scarcity affects 40% of the world’s population and water use is predicted to increase by 50% in....READ MORE
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