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Chinese leaders, aware of the true severity of the crisis, have at last begun to focus the nation's scientific talent on the water issue. The country has been working to develop salt-tolerant and drought-resistant crops, and it has begun to have some success in reclaiming salt-damaged land.
In the West the most troubled dry spot is Mexico, where a government report asserts that "water will be a limiting factor for the country's future development." The demands of Mexico City's 20 million people are causing the level of their main aquifer to drop as much as 3.4 meters (11 ft.) annually. Water subsidies encourage the wealthy and middle classes to waste municipal supplies, while the poor are forced to buy from piperos, entrepreneurs who fix prices according to demand. Belatedly, the government has begun to establish a more sensible system of tariffs as well as promote water-saving devices like low-flush toilets.
Despite the global breadth of the water crisis, the situation is not completely hopeless. In industrial nations the revitalized environmental movement has spawned a fresh offensive against pollution. Jan Dogterom, who runs a consulting firm in the Netherlands, represents a new breed of detective hired by governments to track down the culprits who contaminate waterways. Faced with the knowledge that toxins can be traced back to their source, many companies comply readily in cleanup efforts. Says Dogterom: "It is my honest- to-God conviction that the West European rivers will be clean in 50 years, and the East European rivers will soon follow."
The water-supply picture may not be entirely bleak. Mohamed El-Ashry of the World Resources Institute estimates that around the world 65% to 70% of the water people use is lost to evaporation, leaks and other inefficiencies. The U.S. has a slightly better 50% efficiency, and El-Ashry believes it is economically feasible to reduce losses to 15%.
Government officials and businesses are looking for ways to reuse waste water. With the aid of advanced technology, even highly contaminated water can be made drinkable again. Alcoa has just begun to market a new claylike material called Sorbplus that helps clean water by adsorbing toxic materials.
Most tantalizing of all is the possibility that there are great, undiscovered reservoirs throughout the globe. Speaking in Cairo last June at a water summit organized by the Washington-based Global Strategy Council, Farouk El-Baz of Boston University raised hopes among African nations when he announced that an analysis of remote sensing data has revealed unsuspected supplies of underground water in the dryest part of the Egyptian Sahara. El- Baz believes there may be twice as much water stored underground worldwide as previously assumed.
New supplies could take some pressure off rivers and lakes and would be a temporary godsend to millions of people. But if societies returned to business as usual, this bounty would only postpone the day of reckoning for humans and all other species. Humanity has long deluded itself into thinking that water shortages merely reflect temporary problems of distribution. Both industrial and developing nations are finally realizing that the world's fresh water is a finite and vulnerable resource, an irreplaceable commodity that must be respected and preserved.
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