How human activities affect freshwater scarcity

Its time for the non climatic factors affecting freshwater scarcity! There are so many human factors that affect freshwater resources. Water resources both in quantity and quality are affected by : land use change, the construction and management of reservoirs, pollutant emissions, waste water treatment, population, lifestyle, food consumption, economic policy, societies views of the value of water etc (IPPC, no date).  However I'm only going to mention three human factor which I think are the most important in influencing freshwater resources. Not only because they are the largest factors causing a change in freshwater resources but they link into all the other human factors affecting freshwater resources. 

Firstly the increasingly talked about growing  human population:

The Falkenmark indicator is the most widely used measure of water scarcities because its meanings are intuitive and it is very easy to understand as you will see below. I should have probably mentioned this water stress index from the first blog but better late than never! This stress indicator is a demonstrator that population growth will reduce the amount of available  water per person to troublesome levels: 

 However it is important to note that previous projections of human population are higher than what has been now estimated due to a decline in fertility from 2.5 to 2 resulting in a population of  9 billion by 2050. So this would mean that the future impact on freshwater is not as bad as previously thought Vorosmarty, 2000. However this may have been the case but other factors have come into play since then, which leads us onto our second factor…... higher consumption!

Globally most people are getting richer and more developed (Kenny, 2013). What do we do when we get more developed?? we consume more.. duhh just look at developed countries footprint in comparison to developing countries!  

Now seeing as everything practically everything involves using water our water use increases rapidly when we become more developed. However the major issue here is not for domestic purposes which might seem the most blatant... oooh no it is for agriculture purposes! It takes on average it takes 70 times more water to grow food  than people use directly for domestic purposes. So taking this into consideration reduced freshwater is going to have grave circumstances on food security more than anything- not a nice thought for my tummy.  

                                                         

                                                          global water scarcity 

Moving on... this increase in population together with increase in affluence creates increases in consumption and production leading us onto our third factor ….. pollution. I personally think pollution is going to be one of the most damaging factors to water scarcity because it is the only variable responsible for actually reducing the amount of freshwater globally as it creates the water to become de facto unusable. China and India are currently the major culprits in the pollution of water( no surprise since they are the bosses in production with limited water treatment at the moment) nevertheless there is projected to be an increase in organic micro pollutant everywhereGoel , 2006.This is partly a fault of climate change as I mentioned in a comment to Shafique in my last blog, because it will increase non point pollution into water resources as a result of increase runoff.  

                                            I hope this doesn't end up being the case!

So up to now I have just cleared how climatic and non climatic factors affect freshwater scarcity, so next to come :