The Global Water Crisis impacts many communities around the world due to two main concerns: Water Availability and Water Quality.
Water Availability: The ability to provide enough water to support and sustain a community’s population on a daily basis without negatively impacting the amount of water needed to sustain the health of the local environment.
Water Quality: The ability to provide proper management methods that minimize the potential risk of waterborne illnesses through prevention (removing sources of contamination in the environment) or treatment (filtering/treating water to remove or neutralize sources of contamination).
The Gravity Water System addresses both of these issues.
Water Availability
Water availability is based on two major challenges: physical water scarcity and economic water scarcity.
Physical Water Scarcity is when there is simply not enough water in the environment to meet the demands of the ecosystem and human needs, such as irrigation, industrial water use, and human use/consumption. Many parts of the world suffer from physical water scarcity, either from the lack of precipitation and/or other healthy water sources, climate change, or overwhelming the available supply from increasing demand.
Economic Water Scarcity occurs when there is an insufficient amount of financial resources or human capacity to develop a local water supply, even if the water supply itself may exist. This includes a lack of infrastructure to distribute water and/or the inequitable distribution of water to sections of the population. This is mainly found in places where basic livelihood opportunities don’t exist, and/or political corruption exploits the population’s resources, keeping them in perpetual poverty.
Water Quality
According to a 2019 report from the World Health Organization, an estimated 785 million people lack access to clean water. Children under five face the greatest risk of contaminated water due to undeveloped immune systems, resulting in over 485,000 deaths annually from diarrheal diseases alone. Many water-related diseases, such as Typhoid, Cholera, and Hepatitis (A, E), come from water contaminated with sewage/fecal waste, which is then commonly ingested through drinking or its presence on food items. Without proper education, technological, and financial resources, water pollution will continue to be the cause of death and suffering to millions of people around the globe.
What You Can Do
Even if you live in an area where water availability and water quality are not a daily concern, you have the ability to empower communities that suffer from economic water scarcity to take action and minimize their risk of contamination and waterborne illnesses through a self-contained rainwater harvesting and filtration system.
Want to learn more about Gravity Water's Clean Water System and support our efforts?