Humanity's Global Need For Water As the Earth's population of human inhabitants continues to swell in exponential fashion, moving from 6 billion to 7 billion during the last decade alone, humanity has been forced to confront a crisis it has long ignored: the finite amount of fresh water on the planet. Seemingly every human behavior, from agriculture to armed conflict, requires massive amounts of potable water for a wide array of reasons. Drinking, bathing, waste disposal, washing clothes and dishes, watering lawns and gardens; all of these daily activities are dependent on an available supply of running water. Even specialized activities like cooling heavy machinery during construction projects, clearing silt and debris within mine shafts, and extinguishing house or wild fires necessitate the collection, storage and dispersal of tremendous reserves of water. Despite the seemingly endless supply of fresh...

The relevance of a worldwide water supply study can be clearly defined, as the wide range of cultural beliefs and practices concerning water usage represents useful data in terms of predicting when "peak water" may occur. For example, a similar study published in 2007 by the scholarly journal Water Resources Management found that "the U.S.A. appears to have an average water footprint of 2480,m3/cap/yr, while China…