When NASA sends out probes from Earth to the solar system looking for signs of alien life, the mission controllers have a very simple mantra: ‘follow the water’. For H2O is one of the basic building blocks of life and it is generally assumed that if a planet has water, it might have the ability to sustain life in some form.
On Earth, water is in us and around us. Our bodies are 70 per cent water, and water covers 70 per cent of our planet’s surface. Life could not exist without it. This vital relationship has moulded civilisations. Access to sustainable sources of water historically dictated where populations settled. But today, that primal link has weakened. In developed countries particularly, we are all guilty of turning on the taps without a second thought. We are lucky enough to take water for granted.
But events in Cape Town in 2018, following a one-in-400-year drought that had been going on for the previous three years, illustrated just how delicate the balance is between the demand for water and supply, and that complacency can be disastrous. The city was just 90 days away from ‘Day Zero’ – effectively running out of water.

Indeed, Cape Town’s water crisis got so bad that there were competitions to see who could wash their shirts the least and restaurants encouraged guests not to flush after going to the toilet. It was not an isolated event. In 2022 and 2023 it was California’s turn. Large swathes of the state suffered severe drought and millions of residents were forced to live under mandatory water conservation rules.
Global Water Crisis
Water scarcity is increasing and limited access to clean, safe drinking water is not purely a developing world problem. As global temperatures rise and the world’s population increases, these water events will become more acute and more frequent. Experts describe this as a global water crisis.
Droughts and shortages are one side of the story. In other parts of the world, there is often too much water. Last year, for example, after years of drought, the rainy season in the Horn of Africa brought exceptionally heavy rains and severe flooding in the South of Ethiopia, Eastern Kenya and many regions in southern and central Somalia where 50 people died and almost 700,000 were forced to leave their homes.
Humans rely on just 0 .75 per cent of the planet’s available water, and this precious resource is under stress as we demand more food, more products, and more energy.
Climate change is not the only culprit. Damaging human activity such as deforestation, intensive agriculture and construction, is also feeding the water crisis.
Quantity is not the problem. The Earth is unlikely to run out of water. The issue for humanity is one of accessibility. The majority – 97.5 per cent – of all the water on Earth is undrinkable sea water. A further 1.75 per cent is frozen at the poles, in glaciers and in permafrost. Humans rely on just 0 .75 per cent of the planet’s available water, and this precious resource is under stress as we demand more food, more products, and more energy.

Vincent Casey is a senior water specialist with NGO WaterAid. He tells The Ethicalist: ‘The amount of water on Earth doesn’t really change. It is in a cycle, and it moves through that cycle. But heavy human demand for water can suddenly reduce the amount available across populations. Contamination of that water can also make it unavailable.
‘Sometimes there’s a misconception about exactly what the problem is, and it’s thought that there isn’t enough water, but in some countries there is a lot of water. But it is not where it is needed most and it’s not available when it’s needed most. The reason there is a water security problem in many countries is because the services aren’t there to capture water, store it, treat it, and distribute it to people when and where they need it.’
Dwindling Depths
Much of the water we use is drawn from and then stored in underground aquifers, which are permeable rock into which water seeps. Worryingly, studies suggest that in many parts of the world, these geological features are becoming less reliable.
A recent study at University of California Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science and Management analysed 1,700 aquifers across more than 40 countries and found that groundwater levels in almost half have fallen since 2000. The declines were most apparent in regions with very dry climates and extensive agriculture, including California’s Central Valley and the High Plains region in the United States. There were also sharp declines across Iran. The causes included increased demand from households, agricultural irrigation and sharp declines in precipitation.

Levels had only risen in seven per cent of aquifers in the same period in Australia, China, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Spain and Thailand.
The results reinforce a 2018 study based on data from Nasa satellites which found that over a 14-year period, water resources had depleted in 19 hotspots around the world including California, north-western China, northern and eastern India, and the Middle East. In that study the authors wrote that ‘water is the key environmental issue of the century.’
‘My whole body feels sore. I usually carry 20 litres of water at a time because the water point is far off. While carrying water, I feel the baby in my womb moving. A lot of women have miscarried in this area while going to look for water.’
Esther Elaar, Kenya
The human impact of the global water crisis was illustrated in a 2022 report by charitable foundation Wellcome, in which Ngawosa Eregai, a Community Health Worker in Turkana County, Kenya, explained how four or five people from his community dug holes in dried out river beds with their hands to get to water. ‘We drink this water because we do not have a choice. We trust that it will not be harmful,’ he said.
In the report, pregnant Esther Elaar explained how she walks four hours a day to fetch water for her family. ‘My whole body feels sore. I usually carry 20 litres of water at a time because the water point is far off,’ she explained.

‘While carrying water, I feel the baby in my womb moving. A lot of women have miscarried in this area while going to look for water.’
Many of the world’s problems can be solved with emerging technologies, but this isn’t the case with water, as WaterAid’s Casey explains.
‘It isn’t strictly a technical problem,’ he says. ‘Of course, technology can make the supply of water easier, but the technologies needed to get water to people have been around for hundreds of years. It is a management and financial problem.’
Even desalination, which provides approximately 42 per cent of the United Arab Emirates’ drinking water, 90 per cent of Kuwait’s, 86 per cent of Oman’s and 70 per cent of Saudi Arabia’s, isn’t a global solution, as it tends to be energy intensive and works best for coastal populations because water is very expensive and difficult to transport over distances.
Climate Crisis = Water Crisis
A myriad of factors are detrimental to water security, including unmanaged irrigation, uncontrolled pollution and deforestation. In addition to these localised problems there is also a global bogeyman looming large over the world’s water supply. This is climate change, which is causing droughts, floods, heatwaves and sea level rises around the world.
‘Southern Africa is predicted to get drier under most scenarios, whereas East Africa is predicted to get wetter in absolute terms… The forecast is highly variable. Some areas will experience much greater extremes’
Vincent Casey, Senior Water Specialist, WaterAid
The exact effects of a warming world on Earth’s water distribution patterns are as yet unknown but as global temperature rises, more moisture is stored in the atmosphere, leading to increased weather volatility.
‘The models say different things for different areas,’ says Casey. ‘Southern Africa is predicted to get drier under most scenarios, whereas East Africa is predicted to get wetter in absolute terms, although there will be localised serious drought as we saw in the Horn of Africa between 2020 and 2022 which was the worst for a very long time. The forecast is highly variable. Some areas will experience much greater extremes.’
And the next few years could get increasingly uncomfortable due to the warming El Niño weather effect, which disrupts weather patterns.
‘Climate change interacts with other factors such as El Niño and amplifies, accelerates or exaggerates them,’ says Casey. ‘At present in East Africa the rainfall is heavily influenced by both El Niño and the Indian Ocean dipole (an irregularity of sea surface temperatures in the western Indian Ocean). Rising temperatures increase volatility in the atmosphere and the amount of moisture it holds, and can result in more extreme rainfall events and a greater intensity of rain.’
Lack of Access
The effects of climate change on water patterns are also severely hampering the international community’s commitment to provide access to safe drinking water for everyone. One of the UN’s Strategic Development Goals is to ‘achieve universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all’ by 2030.
It is widely accepted that this is not going to happen by the deadline and that water scarcity will increase. With 2°C warming, up to three billion people are projected to experience chronic water scarcity.

Nevertheless, the commitment continues. In 2022 UNESCO, on behalf of UN-Water, called on states to commit themselves to ‘developing adequate and effective groundwater management and governance policies in order to address current and future water crises throughout the globe.’
‘The sustainable development goal is already off-track. We will not reach it. Water service providers have to keep up with population growth and they already are not.’
In a statement, it said: ‘Globally, water use is projected to grow by roughly one per cent per year over the next 30 years. Our overall dependence on groundwater is expected to rise as surface water availability becomes increasingly limited due to the climate crisis.’ Casey adds: ‘If nothing changes and climate change continues while the global population increases, a larger percentage of that population will continue to go without adequate water services.
The solutions to earth’s water scarcity, he argues, will not be provided by global commitments and targets. ‘You can’t manage water at a global level,’ he says. ‘What is needed are robust localised strategies for managing water and managing it at the basin level.’
Effective water management programs were highlighted in the University of California study which detailed how, in regions where aquifers had increased, such as Bangkok and the Coachella Valley of California, governments had created regulations and programs to reduce groundwater use.
Water management was frequently used to top up groundwater levels. In Spain, for example, water managers are recharging the Los Arenales aquifer using a combination of river water, reclaimed wastewater and runoff from rooftops.
While diverting water from rivers is not always beneficial and can create shortages in other local areas, sound groundwater management does make a lot of sense.
According to WaterAid, for every £1 (AED 4.65) invested in clean water it yields on average £4 (AED 18.6) in economic returns.
And while it would cost just over £21bn (AED 97.7bn) a year until 2030, which is 0.1 per cent of global GDP, to provide water and hygiene to the two billion people on Earth who do not have access to safely managed drinking water, the World Bank estimates that the economic benefits would be huge – a staggering $60bn (AED 220bn) per year.
It is a complex problem and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Water is a global resource and access to it is vital for every living thing on Earth. But it will be down to local communities to design their own resilience measures for the difficult times ahead.