Sustainable development 19: The survival of the human race (water resources)
The earth is our home and ours to protect since our quest in search for other life sustainable planet have failed. However, we have refused to take into cognisance how our unsustainable and dreadful practices are pushing the earth towards its breaking point.
Credit
An example is the Sahara region of North and West Africa where continuous deforestation have made vegetated land to give way to dry baren land becoming very arid making it difficult and unbearable to live there.
These displaced people migrate to nearby regions with conducive environmental conditions to continue their exploitation and extensive land degradation practices which have made the former land uninhabitable. This has further expanded the size of the desert thereby reducing the size of habitable land in North and Sub Sahara Africa pushing people to struggle for the little available resources available.
This is not only common in Africa alone but all around the world, natural resources are being exploited than they can be replenished. Some of these natural resources are infinite but can become finite if they are not sustainably used, an example is water which covers 70% of the earth with only 3% fresh water for human use and 1% of this fresh water is readily available for man to use in the form of rivers, streams, lakes and as underground water.
The 1% of water of fresh water available in these reservoirs are however depleting very fast due to pollution from effluent discharged from big cities and industries, also drought and overuse of underground water resources causes recession of the water table making it almost impossible to access.
If natures resources which we all depend on to survive are not properly utililized/managed for sustainability, i am sorry to say this, the human race will be in the fight for survival to avoid being wiped off the face of earth.
