Introduction

The increasing population along with climatic changes continue to put enormous stresses on freshwater supply. Water resources are valuable to ecosystems and society. Additionally, clean drinking water is essential for good health as well as for agriculture, production of energy, recreation, navigation, and manufacturing. However, most of these uses exert immense pressure on the water resources, and the climatic changes continue to exacerbate the situation. The goal of this article is to elaborate on the impact of increasing populations and climatic changes on freshwater sources, the most impacted areas of the globe, and the best solutions implemented to minimize the effects.

The increasing populations of the globe are on pace to outstrip the supply of freshwater. Furthermore, the deteriorating climatic conditions make the situation even worse as experts project the supplies to dwindle to dangerous levels should there be no policies implemented to regulate use and conservation. Although technology is helping with consumption by increasing efficiency usage, not everyone in the world enjoys or benefits it. Asian countries like the Philippines, Nepal, Afghanistan, and India have little to no access to fresh clean water (Badran et al., 2017). Some African countries also do not access freshwater especially those in the sub- Saharan region. Factually, according to the United Nations, the country in that region expends more than 40 billion hours annually collecting water, which equates the whole year’s worth labor by the entire workforce in France (Distefano & Kelly, 2017). Furthermore, these nations have high population growth with poor governance that translates to poor economic and environmental policies that are critical for the conservation of freshwater and climatic changes.

The increasing population growth in the Philippines and sub-Saharan African countries face the most pressure. Presently, almost 1.8 billion people or 25% of the world’s population, in 17 countries continue to steer towards the water crisis, with huge probabilities of severe shortages in the next few years. The other countries affected by the water crisis include Libya, Eritrea, Oman, Pakistan, India, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar being the worst of all. These countries are in the sub-Saharan region and the Middle East region where rainfall is scare and access to freshwater is a problem. Furthermore, the climatic changes are affecting the weather patterns across the globe; altering rainfall patterns, warming the globe, and eventually exacerbating the drought conditions in those areas. The increasing population in these regions put more pressure on the already low supply of freshwater, and with government agencies that focus on personal corrupt agendas, they fail to implement important policies and strategies to tackle the deteriorating freshwater resources. Severe water shortages have huge economic effects, for instance, in 2019, heatwaves and monsoon delays in the summer months led to the drying up of the freshwater of Chennai in the southern Indian city of Chennai (Rucksthuhl & Ward, 2017). The Indians protested violently since the climatic changes and drought-affected their business to the point where some tech companies asking most if not all their employees to work remotely; from home (Rucksthuhl & Ward, 2017). For nations like Qatar that depend on desalination of seawater, must invest heavily to create drinking water for both the people and the industries. India continues to face the highest risk of freshwater access given that out of the 13^th list of nations with tremendously high-water risk, they have a population more than three times the population of the other 16 nations in the cluster combined. India has the highest population at risk from lack of both water and fresh water supply. In comparison, Pakistan has 204 million people, Iran 83 million, Saudi Arabia 34 million, 13 other nations in the list combine to 68 million, and India boasts a stunning 1.4 billion (Zhao et al., 2019). Extreme groundwater depletion threatens these countries and it is because of global warming and climatic changes that the water is no longer replenished.

The world leaders are trying to restore tropical freshwater ecosystems and limit the number of carbons dumped into the atmosphere, which are primarily responsible for climatic changes. The restoration strategies are urgent and are meant to restore conventional ecological processes lost in the integrated management and rational use and protection of the ecosystem. Nations have begun implementing tree-planting initiatives across the world. The United Nations Environmental Protection (UNEP) alongside other water conservation and climatic restoration activists’ groups continue to push for the implementation of new strategies to reduce water pollution, increase restoration, and conserve the water and the ecosystem. Some nations have implemented methods to deal with acidification, which has been a big problem affecting lakes due to the increased use of fossil fuels; they are doing so by adding lime or calcium carbonate; a technique that most Scandinavian countries, the UK, and eastern Canada implement (Martens, 2017). Riparian areas must be managed better as well as the habitats because these areas are the sources of a healthy ecosystem.

The environmental organizations continue to implement strict rules for industries that pollute freshwater sources. It is the very same fresh-water polluting industries that pollute the environment resulting in climatic changes that further worsen the water crisis. Thus, steep measures to regulate what, when, and how they release treated waste help to restore water sources and conserve the ecosystem. All these methods to regulate the number of wastes created by industries must be correlated by population control because further population growth puts immense pressure on products, services, and food. Industries are consuming more resources, depleting water resources, and producing more pollutants because they seek to keep up with the growing demand caused by the growing population.

Currency and trade agreements impact the water crisis due to the increasing trade amid nations and continents where the production of exports require water. The transportation of virtual water or the volume of water used to produce a commodity; over long distances is essential in the production of exportation goods, affects countries given the direction of flow of the virtual water (Vos & Hinojosa, 2016). For instance, Jordan important around 1 billion cubic meters of virtual water annually and export 1 billion cubic meters (Qu et al., 2018). This disparity means that Jordanians ideally survive owing to the imports of water-exhaustive merchandise from states like the USA. Thus, this means that the World Trade Organizations' top- nations control the direction of virtual water as well as the environmental protection policies in place and industrial regulations concerning water and climatic change influences.

Conclusion

Every year, on an estimate, the countries in the drought-prone areas face high water stresses as they consume over 80% of the available surface and groundwater supplies. Countries like India that have a high population and reside in areas with exceptionally poor reserves of freshwater require interventions to help restore and conserve the little remaining sources. UNEP and other environmental organizations are engaged in a fight with members of the World Trade Organizations as the members focus on profits and not climate and water resources. The issue of freshwater is very political and activities continue to put more pressure on administrations to implement new strategies to conserve water and save lives and livestock as well as the environment. The imbalance existing amid international trade agreements and the international agreement on the sustainability of the use of water will continue to exist especially with the former taking precedence.

References