Land-based glaciers and permanent snow and ice cover approximately 680,000 km2 and are critical to many nations’ water resources.

The total volume of glaciers and permanent snow cover is 24,064 000 km3, which is 1.74% of the total volume of the hydrosphere and 68.7% of the world’s freshwater.

The vast majority (almost 90%) of Earth’s ice mass is in Antarctica, while the Greenland ice cap contains 10% of the total global ice mass.
Read more

Water, sanitation and hygiene have important impacts on both health and disease.

Water-related diseases kill a child every 8 seconds, and are responsible for 80% of all illnesses and deaths in the developing world.

Water-related diseases kill more than 5 million people every year, more than ten times the number killed in wars.

Arsenicosis is caused by long-term exposure to low concentrations of arsenic in drinking-water. It causes painful skin keratosis (hardened lesions) and can result in cancers of the skin, lungs, bladder and kidney. Millions of people are potentially in danger from arsenic poisoning since the water supplies they rely on are contaminated with arsenic (mainly from natural sources) and they either do not have a safe alternative for water supply or are unaware of the risks.
Read more

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.
Read more

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.
Read more

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.
Read more