Water gap: The overuse of fresh water

Abstract

According to the United Nations report on the status of the achievement of the objectives set in the Millennium Development Goals, there are between 900 million and 1 billion people with no access to clean drinking water worldwide (around 750 million of them are in rural areas). The situation is even worse when considering sewage. Around 2.5 billion people do not have basic sanitary facilities, and given the population growth, this figure will hardly change. Approximately 1.5 million people die yearly as a result of water-borne diseases (Heymann et al. 2010: 4).