Why is the world today confronted with a crisis of availability of and access to freshwater resources?

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Ghissu Editorial · Accepted Answer

Freshwater is in crisis because overuse, groundwater mining, climate change and pollution shrink what is usable, while poor infrastructure, underpricing and upstream politics deny access to the poor. About 2.1 billion people still lacked safely managed drinking water in 2024, per the WHO-UNICEF JMP.

**Introduction**

Only about 2.5% of Earth's water is fresh and most is locked in ice and deep aquifers, yet roughly half the world's people face severe scarcity for part of the year (IPCC AR6, 2022). The crisis is one of both availability and access.

**Why Availability Is Shrinking**

1. **Demand outruns renewal**: Agriculture takes about 70% of global withdrawals (FAO), and basins such as the Colorado and Indus are overdrawn.
2. **Groundwater mining**: India extracts 247 bcm a year, and 730 of its 6,762 units are over-exploited (Ground Water Resources, 2025).
3. **Climate change**: Erratic rain and retreating glaciers make supply unreliable, as Cape Town's Day Zero (2018) and Chennai's dry reservoirs (2019) showed.
4. **Pollution and diversion**: Sewage, effluents, arsenic and fluoride make available water unusable, and diversions shrank the Aral Sea.

**Why Access Is Failing**

SKETCH: iceberg | The Freshwater Crisis
visible: Dry taps, Day Zero cities, Tanker queues
hidden: Aquifer depletion, Underpriced water, Upstream control, Weak accounting

1. **Infrastructure and poverty**: About 2.1 billion people lacked safely managed drinking water in 2024 (WHO-UNICEF JMP, 2025).
2. **Pricing and inequity**: Free farm power and flat tariffs reward overuse by the better-off, while women carry the burden of fetching water.
3. **Transboundary politics**: Ethiopia's Grand Renaissance Dam dispute with Egypt and India placing the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance in 2025 show how upstream control becomes leverage.
4. **Weak governance**: Few countries measure what they manage, and India's groundwater rights still follow land ownership (Easements Act, 1882), so deep borewells capture shared aquifers.

**Conclusion**

The crisis is less about absolute scarcity than about how water is used, priced and shared. Basin management, aquifer recharge and water accounting can secure SDG 6 for every household.

Why is the world today confronted with a crisis of availability of and access to freshwater resources?

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