Climbing the water ladder - The new GIS approach

Abstract

There are numerous precious natural resources in the world but the only resource which is needed by everybody, by every country, by rich or poor people and by all other living creatures is water. Water therefore becomes very essential part of daily lives. Unfortunately, our water resources have been struggling over the decades to fully reach the required attention it needed by all people around the world. This is because freshwater still faces challenges including increasing scarcity, lack of accessibility to adequate clean drinking water, deterioration of water quality, fragmentation of water management both nationally and globally, decline of financial resources allocation for water development, threat to world peace and security and a continuing lack of awareness of the magnitude of the problem by the decision makers and the public at large. Nations with abundance of freshwater resources can have an economic advantage over those less endowed. For instance most developed nations today enjoy a degree of abundance in renewable freshwater resources compared to developing nations especially in Africa (Abu-Zeid, 1998). The world population of about six billion is projected to double in the second half of this century and majority of this population will be in the developing nations. Unfortunately, developing nations currently face water and sanitation problems and water-borne diseases (Bouwer, 2000; Thakur et al., 2011).