Fresh water as we know today will be one of the many precious essentials due to their scarcity. So we can do our bits to save water. Why conserve fresh water? Because mankind still doesn't have the expertise for desalination of the sea so that they can be made suitable for human activities. The technology available today for desalination of sea water is still very expensive to implement. So given below are some of the ways in which everyone can save water.
- Washing your car at home usually used up more water than the one done in service centres and professional car wash (Incidentally though the city where I live, doesn't have any car wash centres, to my best knowledge). So we need to take utmost care while washing our car at home.
- Swimming pool on an average loses around 3500 litres of water to evaporation monthly, depending on the local temperature and pool's total surface area. In addition to evaporation, water loss occurs due to leakage through pool's floor or wall.
- Reduce the use of water sprinkler. The sprinklers here in my office is commendable as they are supposed to used Recycled water. You will be surprised to know that in the city of Los Angeles, as a part of drought busting measure, automated sprinklers are allowed to run only 15 minutes on a day from this summer.
- You can also save water while doing the dishes and the laundry.
Now even though you may think why the heck should you think about water conservation. It's not like if you got your everyday supply ready, then you don't need to worry about others. In the long run, it's going to affect everyone on Earth. It's just a matter of time. Do you know that the water resources that mankind consumes is 20% faster than Earth can replenish the reservoir through the natural cycle of evaporation and rainfall. And one can always argue that the natural cycle of evaporation and rainfall has never cease to act, so why worry?
When faced with such queries, tell those people on their face that the cycle will never stop but the consumption rate is faster than the generation rate.So we need to worry. Have anyone heard about the Aral sea in central Asia? It was one of the largest fresh water body in the world. But today it has started drying up very fast. People needs to learn about such reality. And you know why the Aral sea dried up so fast. Only because of increased human activities and utilization of this sea for economic growth. Just like the Aral sea, many other rivers are also facing decrease in fresh water input from the upstream due to pollution and increased consumption in the upstream. This will ultimately lead to increase in salinity of water near the river-mouth and thus the ocean/sea will begin eroding into the coastline.
It's just too frightening to see that such vast water bodies drying up very fast in a span of some 30 years. So think over this. The future generations may never have the pleasure of fishing or rafting or just sailing on a boat in a lake. The impact of fresh water scarcity is too many to count and it will surely affect the economy.
Let us hope that someday we'll find a solution to this challenge faced by mankind.
