It is estimated that more than 1.3 billion people in the developing world survive on less than a dollar a day and almost 3 billion survive on less than two dollars per day.
In order to free people from the burden of disease and malnutrition, the need for secure access to water for the poor has been more strongly recognized.
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Between 1960 and 2004, there has been a significant rise in water-related extreme events, such as floods, windstorms, drought and landslide.
Statistics from the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) in Belgium revealed that during the ten-year period from 1996 to 2005, about 80% of all natural disasters were of meteorological or hydrological origin.
For 1992–2001, losses from water-related disasters were estimated globally at US $446 billion, accounting for about 65% of economic loss due to all natural disasters.
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Virtually all governments accept that settlements with more than 20,000 inhabitants are urban centres but disagree about where to draw the line between urban and rural for settlements with fewer than 20,000 inhabitants. Some classify all settlements with only a few hundred inhabitants as ‘urban’ while others consider most or all settlements with up to 20,000 inhabitants as ‘rural’. This has significance for two reasons: a very high proportion of people live in settlements with between 500 and 20,000 inhabitants; and their designation as urban populations generally means more government structures and improved provision for water and sanitation.
Roughly 3% of the earth’s land surface is occupied by urban areas, with the highest concentrations occurring along the coasts and waterways.
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As it follows from the head of this paragraph, the human merits will be discussed hereinafter. It is not a secret that a different attitude of people to water can be met in our life – from worship of water as the certain sacred gift towards an odious behavior when a man disposes his wastes into flowing water of aryks or canals.
However, a person with such an attitude to water can show concern with respect to an abandoned slice of bread – shakes off it from dust, places against his forehead, and carefully puts it in a secluded nook. Why is his behavior so different with respect to bread and water, although he knows, or has to know, that a role of water in our life no less important than of bread? For instance, a man can survive without water only three days, and without bread a few weeks. Why an internal “protective relay” or moral brakes of a man function in different ways under different situations? Of course, such a matter is in the competence of psychoanalysts and specialists in morality and ethics, but it is of interest for all.
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Climate change is associated with global warming and is a long-term change caused by natural factors and, as is now accepted, human activities due to greenhouse gas emissions.
The average temperature of the earth’s surface has risen by 0.6°C since the late 1800s. It is expected to increase by another 1.4 to 5.8°C by the year 2100, and the sea level may rise from 9 to 88 cm during the same period.
It is generally agreed that more precipitation can be expected from 30° North and 30° South because of increased evapotranspiration. In contrast, many tropical and subtropical regions are expected to receive lower and more erratic precipitation in the future.
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