Water Is The Most Valuable Resource For Over 2 Billion Water-Scarce People

At the end of September, dramatic images from Brazil, suffering from an unprecedented drought, spread around the world. Rivers without water, masses of dead fish, and interrupted river transport routes.

The topic of global water security is at the center of the two-day conference (October 4 and 5) entitled “Rome Water Dialogue,” organized in the Italian capital by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), to focus on integrated water resources management, as well as agricultural and food security.

Currently, more than 2 billion people live in countries with high or even critical water scarcity. “We must stop taking water for granted,” said FAO Director General Qu Dongyu (China), recalling that “agriculture accounts for more than 70% of the planet’s freshwater intake.” It is agriculture that “holds the solutions to the water crisis, as well as the key to achieving global water and food security, increasing efficiency, reducing impacts, and reusing wastewater.”

According to FAO experts, “if humanity manages to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, it will benefit water resources and reduce water scarcity caused by climate change,” as is happening in Brazil and the Amazon in particular. By 2050, “global demand for water for agriculture is expected to increase by 35%, with more than 80% of wastewater released into the environment without treatment or reuse.”

In his opening speech at the Rome Conference, Qu Dongyu recalled the importance of the 4R approach, based on the principles of reducing water loss, reusing urban water, recycling treated wastewater, and reclaiming contaminated groundwater.

Only this way it will be possible to address, in the most efficient way, the serious water challenges caused mainly by water-related natural disasters, which have resulted in direct worldwide economic costs exceeding $200 billion in 2021 alone (latest available data).

And, of course, there is no shortage of alarming figures released by the FAO. Almost a billion tons of food are wasted every year, which is 17% of the food supplied by the agriculture and agri-food industries to consumers worldwide. “As a consequence, year after year, the waste of precious resources, such as water, used to produce all this food, increases,” said UN experts, according to whom “95% of our food is produced on land, and it all starts with soil and water.”