Freshwater drain

In many African countries already, you are expected to get by on as little as twenty liters of water each day — less than half of what water organizations say is necessary for public health.

Today, the crisis is political — which is to say, not inevitable or necessary or beyond our capacity to fix — and, therefore, functionally elective. That is one reason it is nevertheless harrowing as a climate parable: an abundant resource made scarce through governmental neglect and indifference, bad infrastructure and contamination, careless urbanization and development. There is no need for a water crisis, in other words, but we have one anyway, and aren’t doing much to address it. Some cities lose more water to leaks than they deliver to homes: even in the United States, leaks and theft account for an estimated loss of 16 percent of freshwater; in Brazil, the estimate is 40 percent. In both cases, as everywhere, scarcity plays out so nakedly on a stage defined by haveand-have-not inequities that the resulting drama of resource competition can hardly be called, truly, a competition; the deck is so stacked that water shortage looks more like a tool of inequality. The global result is that as many as 2.1 billion people around the world do not have access to safe drinking water, and 4.5 billion don’t have safely managed water for sanitation.