The World Water Crisis

 

While approximately two thirds of out planet is water, the largest proportion is salt water, and only some 3% is 'fresh' water. The availability of fresh water available to the world's population is is less than 0.007% of the world's total water.
This is serious indeed and anyone can do an Internet search to find the exact figures.
In England for example, if you take a glass of water from the tap, you do so knowing that the water has already passed through the bodies of seven people.
Here in New Zealand, dairy farming has put extra pressure on the water resource and the fecal count in waterways means that all drinking water needs to be treated. And again, the resource now has a limit on it, and therefore a value.
Within Footsteps NZ-TZ I will record some of my experiences relating to water and hope that somehow there will become a greater awareness of the need to conserve the finite resource that it is.

Humankind has contributed to the rapid decline of water quality, but some natural resources are polluted as well.
The water from the slopes of Mt Meru has contaminants of fluoride and other salts. This causes browning of teeth, and in some cases bone deformities.
People visiting this part of Tanzania often assume  people's teeth have been poorly looked after or are rotten from eating sugar cane. Not so, the cause is fluoride in the water!
Of course the local population is aware of the contaminants but they have no choice but to drink it.

To illustrate just how finite the water-for-consumption resource is, whenever or wherever water is consumed at least on molecule has passed through the body of Cleopatra!