Water Usability Degradation

Abstract

Humans and many of their activities depend on clean water but pollute it during use. Water—a unique solvent—when moving through the landscape on its way to the river mouth, meets pollutants almost “everywhere” along its pathways. As a result, water pollution has been building up over time in rivers, lakes, aquifers and coastal waters. The pollution situation is particularly serious in industrializing, developing countries, where polluting, medium-scale industry constitutes the socio-economic backbone of whole cities and regions, which seriously complicates implementation of strict and costly pollutant abatement regulations. Evidence is now increasing of water pollution threatening the economic development of megacities, small islands, and shared transnational river basins. A set of global scenarios suggest that the world may be facing severe health effects from persistent pollutants some four decades from now. Difficulties in reversing the escalating water pollution have been severely underestimated both in terms of the possibility to finance, the social acceptance of abatement efforts, the time delays involved in achieving intended result, and the administrative fragmentation thresholds. The article explains the dilemma and the shifts in thinking needed to reverse the dangerous development and concludes that the water community has to take much stronger part in the debate to counteract the current resource illiteracy and to help diverting humanity from the population and economic collapses projected to happen.

Keywords:

• water quality genesis
• water pollution abatement
• future threats
• regulatory tools
• mental barriers
• time delays