The increasing water demand and the crucial role of karst waters in the future
Attention text traslated in english with AI CHATGPT
This article is based on the booklet “L’acqua che berremo” published by the Italian Speleological Society.
Around the world, there is a worrying increase in water demand, a trend that appears to be constantly growing.
Faced with the progressive depletion of traditional supply sources, karst waters will play a fundamental role in the future.
Every time we turn on a tap for our daily needs, we should be aware of the fortune we have in our hands.
An automatic gesture replaces the endless effort of carrying heavy containers home from the nearest source or well, which is rarely healthy.
This task falls almost exclusively on women and children in over 80 countries where 1.4 billion people do not have direct access to good quality water.
This essential occupation for the family economy takes hours away from study, work, or play and consumes about a third of the daily available calories in certain areas of the world.
Moreover, these precarious and uncontrolled water supplies represent a serious health risk; in developing countries, about 80% of all diseases are spread by infected water, and cases of poisoning due to various types of pollutants are increasingly frequent.
Although in 1977 the United Nations proclaimed that “all peoples have the right to access drinking water in quantities and quality equal to their essential needs,” more than a quarter of a century later, the global situation has worsened, at least statistically.
Many advances have been nullified by population growth, the enormous demand for agricultural use, and the loss of resources due to pollution, increased salinity, and the lowering of water tables.
It is perhaps worth reminding those who believe these realities concern “others,” being far from us in space and time, that even in Italy, water supply is a recent achievement.
Bologna did not have a distribution system until 1881, when the Roman aqueduct, unused for fourteen centuries, was reactivated, and Bari was reached by the Apulian Aqueduct only in 1915.
Rural houses have been connected to aqueducts only in the last fifty years, and even today, due to incredible stories of disorganization and waste, in the islands and the South, tens of thousands of families have to rely on cisterns supplied by “water carriers,” without any qualitative and hygienic control.
The easy and abundant availability of water is perhaps the most significant parameter in evaluating the living conditions of a population, and regarding the hygienic-sanitary situation, it is certainly in the first place.
Without water, one cannot live; with “bad” water, one lives poorly and dies early. For water, international tensions are swelling, which it is tragically easy to foresee will lead to conflicts.
UNESCO hypothesizes a serious global water shortage from 2020, with a corollary of implications for health, sociology, and political stability of a scope that is difficult to predict.
Will we be able to make water suffice for everyone? And what will happen if we fail?