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==Introduction== | ==Introduction== | ||
Why is water so important to us? Firstly, it is one of the fundamental requirements for human physical survival along with oxygen, food, shelter and sleep. It is one of the basic human rights guaranteed by the United Nations. According to the UN Human Rights Council, ''"the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation is derived from the right to an adequate standard of living and inextricably related to the right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, as well as the right to life and human dignity".''<ref>Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights: The Right to Water and Sanitation Toolkit [online] [cit 1.11.2013] http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/ESCR/Pages/Water.aspx</ref> But it is not only a basic factor in the maintenance of our lives and the life of every organic lifeform on the planet, it is also essential to every other aspect of human life from cooking and cleaning, to transport and energy, to climate and food production, to carbon sequestration (the oceans act as a vital carbon sink and hence are becoming more and more acidified), to our religious rituals (think of the Catholic Church's use of holy water or the ablutions required of Islam before prayer), to our physical landscape (our coastlines, lakes, rivers, glacial valleys, etc) and to our mental landscape (our art, poetry and literature is full of water images, e.g. Stauss's The Blue Danube, Smetana's The Moldau, etc). | Why is water so important to us? Firstly, it is one of the fundamental requirements for human physical survival along with oxygen, food, shelter and sleep. It is one of the basic human rights guaranteed by the United Nations. According to the UN Human Rights Council, ''"the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation is derived from the right to an adequate standard of living and inextricably related to the right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, as well as the right to life and human dignity".''<ref>Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights: The Right to Water and Sanitation Toolkit [online] [cit 1.11.2013] http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/ESCR/Pages/Water.aspx</ref> | ||
For basic physical survival, a human requires something between 2 and 5 litres of water per day. If we add the water needed for cooking and washing, then a Bedouin tribe from the Middle East can make do on roughly 20-30 litres of water per day, while sedentary populations require an absolute minimum of 100 litres per person a day for safe hygiene and an adequate standard of living<ref>Mohsen</ref> | |||
But it is not only a basic factor in the maintenance of our lives and the life of every organic lifeform on the planet, it is also essential to every other aspect of human life from cooking and cleaning, to transport and energy, to climate and food production, to carbon sequestration (the oceans act as a vital carbon sink and hence are becoming more and more acidified), to our religious rituals (think of the Catholic Church's use of holy water or the ablutions required of Islam before prayer), to our physical landscape (our coastlines, lakes, rivers, glacial valleys, etc) and to our mental landscape (our art, poetry and literature is full of water images, e.g. Stauss's The Blue Danube, Smetana's The Moldau, etc). | |||
The human body itself is composed mainly of water: about 75 to 80% of babies, to between 50 and 65% of adults, while our brains are composed of up to 85% water.<ref>Chemcraft, “Water in the Body” [online] [cit 1.11.2013] http://www.chemcraft.net/wbody.html</ref> The planet’s surface is made up of 71% water, but only 0.03% of this is available to us as fresh water. Of the 1.386 km3 of water on the Earth’s surface, 96.5% is made up of the oceans, another 1% is saline ground water, and only 2.5% is fresh water. Of that 2.5%, 68.7% is locked up in the polar ice caps, 30.1% is found in groundwater, and 1.2% is surface water.<ref>Chemistryviews.org, Amount and composition of global water [online] [cit | The human body itself is composed mainly of water: about 75 to 80% of babies, to between 50 and 65% of adults, while our brains are composed of up to 85% water.<ref>Chemcraft, “Water in the Body” [online] [cit 1.11.2013] http://www.chemcraft.net/wbody.html</ref> The planet’s surface is made up of 71% water, but only 0.03% of this is available to us as fresh water. Of the 1.386 km3 of water on the Earth’s surface, 96.5% is made up of the oceans, another 1% is saline ground water, and only 2.5% is fresh water. Of that 2.5%, 68.7% is locked up in the polar ice caps, 30.1% is found in groundwater, and 1.2% is surface water.<ref>Chemistryviews.org, Amount and composition of global water [online] [cit | ||