As the world warms due to human-caused climate change, it is becoming harder for many people to access fresh water for drinking, cooking and cleaning purposes.
This is because a warming world is leading to erratic rainfall patterns, extreme temperatures and periods of drought; in addition to decades of poor water management and extractive policies around the world. The United Nations estimates that approximately 2.2 billion people worldwide do not have access to safely managed drinking water.
This World Water Day, Associated Press journalists from around the world interviewed some of the people struggling to obtain fresh water.
LIMA, PERU
Justina Flores, a 50-year-old grandmother, lives in a mountainous suburb of Lima, Peru, without running water. With some of the water he receives from the government, he washes the clothes of his family of six by hand and then uses it to wash the dog or pours it on the ground outside to prevent dust from entering his house.
The Peruvian government provides drinking water to 1.5 million of its poorest residents living in hills like Flores. Giant tankers filled with water pass through steep roads, and the scarce resource often leads to conflicts between neighbors.
Flores tries to use as little water as possible for all his daily activities. I have an old washing machine, but hand washing means it can save around 45 liters (12 gallons) of water per wash.
He and his family take in about 3,000 liters (790 gallons) each week for all their laundry, cooking and cleaning, while an equally sized family in San Isidro, the capital’s wealthiest district, uses an average of 11,700 liters (3,090 gallons). According to official data, 1 gallon per week comes from water coming from pipes.
Flores has worked as a maid in the homes of wealthy families since she was a child, so she has seen this inequality firsthand.
“You can take as many baths as you want in these houses. “Twice a week at most here,” he said, looking out his window at the buildings dotting the hills.
JAKARTA, INDONESIA
In the vast archipelago nation of Indonesia, access to clean water is uncertain; even in Jakarta, the country’s most developed city, where more than 10 million people live.
Since she was a young girl, Devi Putri Eka Sari, now 37 and a mother of three, has been forced to buy water from vendors who wander up and down the narrow asphalt streets in her low-income neighborhood, even after the government crackdown. Water pipes and pumps were installed that draw water from the ground.
The state says its water is unreliable: Sometimes the tap drips when you turn it on. Even if it flowed regularly, he wouldn’t dare use it for drinking.
“This is not healthy. It’s full of bacteria that will make you sick,” he said. “It smells like a pool, like chemicals.”
Her fears about bacteria are not unfounded: According to the World Health Organization, seven in 10 households in Indonesia consume drinking water contaminated with E. coli.
Instead, Sari, like millions of Indonesians across the country, buys water in large refillable containers or single-use packaged plastic bottles. These are easy to find, but they create huge amounts of litter in cities’ waterways that are already clogged with plastic.
“This is what I’ve been doing my whole life,” Sari said. “That’s the option we have.”
RAS EL MA, MOROCCO
Mimoun Nadori squats down to dip her hand into the river and taste the water next to the groves where her family has long grown fruits and vegetables on their farm in northern Morocco.
He grimaced. Salty. But it wasn’t like this before.
“Everything was green,” he recalls. “We drank from the river and washed with the river. “We built a life with him.”
But less rainfall and more dams and upstream pumping have resulted in less water flowing from Morocco’s Moulouya River, threatening the livelihoods of farmers like Nadori. The river now stands stagnant where it once flowed from the mountains to the Mediterranean, causing seawater to flow inland and turning the water from a source of life into a deadly poison.
After his cows, which were used to drinking water from the river, died, Nadori started importing water for the chicken coop he ran. He neither knew that the water was bitter nor that they fed on it until they died.
Overexploitation of the river has also put new pressures on underground water reserves, as Moroccan farmers like Nadori and farmers across the nearby Algerian border dig more wells to compensate for the loss of ancient water supplies. supply.
“We’re not going to lie and say it’s just humans or the drought, it’s both,” he said. “We don’t know how to use water and we waste a lot of water.”
CORNING, CALIFORNIA
There was a time when, on hot summer days, the water in Fred and Robin Imfeld’s pool sparkled and their garden was full of plants.
But two years ago, the well supplying water to their home in rural Corning, California, went dry for the first time in nearly 40 years. Now the pool is empty and the trees are the color of rust.
Across California, record numbers of local wells have dried up in recent years due to drought and overpumping, causing groundwater levels to plummet. The couple wants to drill a new, deeper well, but $25,000 is a big expense.
These days they depend on government-funded water deliveries. Twice a month, they take a 9,463-liter (2,500-gallon) tank outside their garage filled with water for showering, washing dishes, and doing laundry. They also receive 113 liters (30 gallons) of drinking water every two weeks for cooking and drinking.
Fred carries water when they need a little more, as he did when they had been thoroughly dry for seven months before buying the tank. He loads the containers into his truck, drives the three miles to a friend’s house, and fills them with water.
“We’re emotionally drained from our own personal lives and trying to cope with (the water) and worrying about what’s going to happen and where do we go from here,” Fred said.
MAKUENI DISTRICT, KENYA
Joyce Mule was walking for nearly two hours to find water. Water is very scarce in his rugged and rocky village in Makueni County in Kenya’s dry southeast. Piped water is very scarce and there are few reliable alternatives.
One way the mule got water was through scoop holes in sandy river beds. These work by people digging in the sand and the water held in the pore spaces percolating through the adjacent sand into the hole. This method is still popular in southeastern Kenya.
But in 2012, he and his fellow villagers decided to solve this problem by adopting rock harvesting, a method of collecting rainwater from rock outcroppings, naturally occurring giant boulders that stand hundreds of feet above the ground. The mule brings water from here about five times a day, and it takes about half an hour to take it home.
The technology works simply: Villagers build a concrete wall around the rock to trap rainwater. They placed large stones to filter the water and a pipe to carry the water to storage tanks. Water collected from the rock basin flows through the pipe into tanks and then flows to a nearby water collection point where residents collect it from taps.
He is happy because it is close, always accessible and the water is clean. As a result, their trees produce more fruit and their cows produce more milk.
“We used to think these rocks were worthless, but now we see their benefits,” he said.
BAWAL, INDIA
Ramkrishan Malawat, 52, remembers a time when groundwater was only 21 meters (70 feet) below surface level and a fast-flowing river 10 kilometers (6 miles) from his farm in Bawal, near New Delhi, provided abundant water.
But now the river has dried up and the water is 76 meters (250 feet) underground. “Every year we have to dig deeper,” he said. Malawat uses a borewell to supply water to his crops such as mustard, maize and various millets.
The deeper the water, the more polluted it is, he claims, because “the level of contamination from fluoride and other chemicals increases.”
India is the world’s largest extractor of groundwater and pumps out more water than the US and China combined, according to the UN
Extraction of water for farming, construction and other needs, combined with climate changes such as erratic rainfall and extreme temperatures, means groundwater levels have fallen dramatically across the country.
“There’s a lot of construction around here, and now when it rains, the water runs off instead of seeping into the ground and replenishing stock,” Malawat said. Bawal is known for its automotive industry rather than agriculture. “Sometimes I worry that in 10 to 15 years there won’t be enough water for agriculture in my town.”
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Associated Press reporters Carlos Mureithi in Makueni, Kenya; Sibi Arasu and Bawal in Bengaluru, India, Manish Swarup in India; Dorany Pineda in Los Angeles; Sam Metz and Oussama Alaoui in Ras El Ma, Morocco; Victoria Milko in Jakarta, Indonesia; Franklin Briceño in Lima, Peru, and Natalia Gutierrez in New York contributed to this report.
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