The World’s Water Crisis

At the recent G8 summit in Evian, France, delegates met to discuss, among other issues, how to provide safe drinking water to the 1.5 billion of the world’s citizens who live without it. Everyone within the summit gates enjoyed the free and plentiful bottled mineral water. “It’s obscene,” says one journalist who attended the conference, held near the source of one of the world’s most famous bottled water brands. “How can they not see that holding the summit in this place and talking about water in Africa is tasteless. It’s beyond comprehension.”

In fact, although many people might agree philosophically with Mikhail Gorbachev when he said, “Clean water is a universal human right,” the world is sharply divided in terms of access to safe hydration. Those who can afford it are guzzling ever-increasing numbers of designer water bottles, while half the world’s population lacks basic sanitation facilities, according to the United Nations (UN). Diseases caused by unsanitary water kill five to 12 million people a year, most of them women and children. A child dies every eight seconds from a preventable water-borne disease.

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