Water Supply: Our Impact on the Planet

The world’s water situation is a bucketful of paradoxes – Europe floods, Africa parches, clean water brings incalculable health benefits, dirty water spreads disease – and on and on. The only certain thing is that there is no new water; we can only use what we’ve got, so water management is the way to a better water situation worldwide.

Bowden explains this eloquently and in fascinating detail, showing us that only 2.5% of global water is fresh water, that in this country only 3% of fresh water is used for agriculture whereas in Denmark they use 43% (which must be why their bacon is so wet) but whereas irrigation may increase crop yields it’s also a highly efficient disease-spreader.

This book is a well of water-information as it re-values water as the ‘new oil’, and fills a much needed but little heeded gap in the available range of resource-information. It should be added to any serious collection, and for once the publishers’ ‘Ideal for Citizenship’ claim is spot on.