Apr 8 2010
"Though water covers our world, more than 97 percent is salty. Two percent is fresh water locked in snow and ice, leaving less than one percent for us," writes National Geographic [Nat Geo] editor Chris Jones in an introduction to the magazine's April issue that examines the effects of diminishing water supplies around the world. "By 2025, 1.8 billion people will live where water is scarce," he adds (3/15).
"Some of the anecdotes Nat Geo uses to illustrate this point are familiar: glaciers retreating, freshwater fish dying off, and women in developing countries having to walk really, really far for the kind of water that most of us in the developed world wouldn't deign to wash our laundry in, let alone drink or bathe with," Newsweek's blog, "The Human Condition," writes of the issue. "But other anecdotes are less familiar, and show just how bad things have gotten: in the slums of Delhi people are literally killing each other for want of a few containersfull. And along war-torn borders throughout the world (Israel-Jordan, India-Pakistan, Turkey-Syria), water is poised to reshape geopolitics as much as oil ever did" (Interlandi, 4/5).
Nat Geo's Web site features photographs, video and graphics describing the effects of and potential solutions of water scarcity throughout the world (April 2010).
 This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
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