Humans can live about 2 months without food, but only about 1 week without water!
Although 70% of the Earth is covered by water there is a shortage of clean drinking water. Today an increasing amount of water is required in the home, in industry, and for a continually growing population and the tourist industry using water for pools, showers and clean towels every day. Water is also essential for growing foodstuff and is a vital factor for agriculture.
The increasing amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is altering the acidity of sea water, so that corals and other marine animals have difficulty in absorbing oxygen and may die. In Australia the world's largest coral reef, the Great Barrier Reef may not survive.
The acidification of the oceans, lakes and rivers is the worst ever, and fish and other marine animals are in danger due to acidification, pollution and overfishing. By depleting the oceans of fish we also remove the basis of existence for many people.
In the oceans there are several large waste fields (e.g. the Great Pacific Garbage Patch) consisting of many million tons of plastic and other waste materials from waste water outlets, to the detriment of birds, fish and other marine animals.
90% of the waste stems from outlets from rivers as the Niger, Nile, Ganges, Yangtze a.o., and by 2050 there may be even more plastic than fish in the sea.
Rivers, lakes and oceans have been polluted and turned into refuse dumps and nature is no longer able to clean up. Man is the guilty part.
Thor Heyerdahl, 1914-2002, Norwegian ethnographer, RA expedition 1970:
The Atlantic was no longer blue. Plastic bottles floated among the waste. We might have been in a squalid city port.
