Environmental Impacts and Water Availability

    The United Nations is one of the global leaders that provides a hopeful outlook of water availability in the future by stating that "Between 2015 and 2022, the proportion of the world’s population with access to safely managed drinking water increased from 69 per cent to 73 per cent.”(UN) Since then, the last two years have been setting record high temperatures, making them the hottest years ever recorded. One of the facts and figures the UN provides regarding Goal 6 is that “Only 0.5 per cent of water on Earth is useable and available freshwater”.(UN) The USGS states that only 1.2 % of all freshwater is surface freshwater. With global temperatures rising, surface water is more at risk of evaporating into the atmosphere and becoming a greenhouse gas. This is a concern because water is the main source of life, but it is primarily treated as a commodity.

  

    In 2022, NASA published an article titled How Atmospheric Water Vapor Amplifies Earth’s Greenhouse Effect, the influence of water vapor as a greenhouse gas is highly emphasized and explained but does not go without saying that CO2 is still the “king” GHG. However, NASA describes water vapor as “a different animal”. The difference is that water vapor is condensable, making it the only greenhouse gas that has this property. NASA describes the occurring positive feedback loop from water vapor as the “only greenhouse gas whose concentration increases because the atmosphere is warming and causes it to warm even more.” If CO2 is “king”, what sort of GHG nickname should we give to H₂O(g)?

    The USGS helps us understand where our freshwater is located in a 2019 article titled How Much Water is There on Earth?. It is estimated that the ocean makes up around 97% of the world’s total water supply. The remaining 3% is the amount of freshwater present on earth. Of that 3%, in 2019, over 68% of the freshwater was found in the form of glaciers and ice. 30% of the total freshwater on earth was located underground. This means that about roughly 2% of the total freshwater is found in the form of surface freshwater. The next statistic from the USGS Water Science School is the one that really surprised me and gives even more hope in the fight against the water crisis. “Rivers are the source of most of the fresh surface water people use, but they only constitute about 509 mi3 (2,120 km3), about 1/10,000th of one percent of total water.” (USGS). It is encouraging to note that we are only using a small portion of the available freshwater supply to generate energy and provide drinking water to many metropolis cities around the world.

    Statistics involving the world’s total water supply are from the Russian Hydrologist Igor Shiklomanov's, in Peter H. Gleick’s 1993 volume Water in Crisis: A Guide to the World's Fresh Water Resources. This volume was published 32 years ago but the levels of available water on Earth have not changed since then. These statistics provide hope that water resources are not drastically decreasing but ocean levels have risen by 4 inches since 1993 and the ease of obtaining freshwater water is changing drastically.

One estimate of global water distribution 
 
(Percents are rounded, so will not add to 100) 

Water source	Water volume, in cubic miles	Water volume, in cubic kilometers	Percent of    freshwater	Percent of    total water
Oceans, Seas, & Bays	321,000,000	1,338,000,000	--	96.54
Ice caps, Glaciers, & Permanent Snow	5,773,000	24,064,000	68.7	1.74
Groundwater	5,614,000	23,400,000	--	1.69
Fresh	2,526,000	10,530,000	30.1	0.76
Saline	3,088,000	12,870,000	--	0.93
Soil Moisture	3,959	16,500	0.05	0.001
Ground Ice & Permafrost	71,970	300,000	0.86	0.022
Lakes	42,320	176,400	--	0.013
Fresh	21,830	91,000	0.26	0.007
Saline	20,490	85,400	--	0.006
Atmosphere	3,095	12,900	0.04	0.001
Swamp Water	2,752	11,470	0.03	0.0008
Rivers	509	2,120	0.006	0.0002
Biological Water	269	1,120	0.003	0.0001