1) 2 billion people lack access to safe potable drinking water.
2) 31 countries face chronic drinking water shortages today.
3) By 2025, 48 countries will face potable water shortages affecting nearly 3 billion people.
4) Less than 1% of the world’s fresh water (or about 0.007% of all water on earth) is readily accessible for direct human use.
5) Oceans store most of earth’s water – approximately 97%.
6) Only 2.5% of earth’s water is fresh water.
7) Over 61% of the world’s fresh water is located in Antarctica
8) The overall amount of water on our planet has remained the same for two billion years.
9) The earth’s total amount of water has a volume of about 344 million cubic miles.
- 315 million cubic miles is seawater.
- 9 million cubic miles is groundwater in aquifers.
- 7 million cubic miles is frozen in polar ice caps.
- 53,000 cubic miles of water pass through the planet’s lakes and streams.
- 4,000 cubic miles of water is atmospheric moisture.
- 3,400 cubic miles of water are locked within the bodies of living things.
10) A quarter of the world’s population is without safe drinking water.
11) Most of the world’s people must walk at least 3 hours to fetch water.
12) The single largest freshwater resource suitable for drinking is Lake Baikal in Siberia, which has a very low salt and calcium content and is very clean.
13) The World Water Assessment Program indicates that, in the next 20 years, the quantity of water available to everyone is predicted to decrease by 30%.
14) Only about 3% of the water on our planet is freshwater. Groundwater accounts for about 14% of that 3%, while ice sheets and glaciers account for about 85%. The rest is in lakes, streams, reservoirs, the air and soil, and rivers. In the United States, groundwater supplies about 50% of our drinking water, 40% of the water used for irrigation, and about 25% of the water used by various industries.
15) The Great Lakes have 80 percent of the United States fresh water supply.
16) By 2025 2.4 billion will be living without fresh water
17) About 1/3 of the water that falls to Earth runs off the surface in streams rather then soaking into the Earths soil. A drop of water finding its way to a stream will spend two weeks there on average before rejoining the ocean..
18) There may be as much water locked in the Earths minerals as there is in the Earths oceans.
19) Brazil has the worlds largest fresh water supply. The US has the worlds 4th largest fresh water supply.
20) Where the worlds Fresh water supply is used:
8%- Domestic and municipal
22%- Industrial
70%- Agriculture
21) The leaves in one acre of broad leafed forest may release as much as 8,000 gallons of water a day into the air as water vapor through the tiny pours in their leaves.
22) The Aral Sea has lost 75% of its volume and more than half its surface area between 1973 and 2004 as a result of cotton farmers.
23) In 27 developing countries, most of them in Asia and Africa, clean relatively convenient water is unavailable to over 900 million people.
24) The average American individual uses 100 to 176 gallons of water at home each day – the average African family uses about 5 gallons of water each day.
25) 2 in 3 people lacking access to clean water live on $2 a day.
26) Poor people living in the slums often pay 5-10 times more per liter of water than wealthy people living in the same city.
27) The only way to ensure pure, contaminant-free drinking water is through the use of a point-of-use filtration system.
28) It takes 25 gallons of groundwater to irrigate each 2 square foot area of wheat field.
29) It takes 1,851 gallons of water to refine one barrel of crude oil.
30) It takes 25 gallons of water to make one pound of plastic.
31) More than 60% of the worlds rivers have been dammed or diverted.
32) Today, Dams generate 20% of the worlds electric power and provide needed water for irrigation to cities.
33) It takes 700 gallons of water to make a Cheeseburger.