Global Environmental Society

Enormous ocean dead-zones, toxic blooms of algae that span for miles, poisonous gas killing seabirds and respiratory disease on land. The oceans reprocess our waste, clean our water and provide a vast wealth of nutrition. We need to understand our part in the symbiosis, if we don't is there a future for the world's oceans?

The business community is well aware that there is a fortune to be made from any resource that is both essential and hard to obtain. As water becomes scarce, those who control it hold the keys to life itself.

It is an often observed truism that if you want to know what is really going on, you should follow the money. With this in mind, the massive surge of interest in water investment over the last few years should convince even the most skeptical that the water issue is here to stay.

By recycling used water, we can live with just a couple of buckets of fresh, clean water a day, while the rest of our water will come from recycled sources.

We eat, we drink, we prepare food. We have a bath or shower, we brush our teeth and flush the toilet. We hose down our cars and pavements, water the garden and wash the floor.

During the last World Economic Forum, water scarcity seemed to have been put on the pedestal in replacement of the global warming issue. The correlation of these two is, however, commonly still underestimated. Water is increasingly becoming a scarce commodity: in many parts of the world, people do not have regular and clean access to this priceless resource. Only 3% of this planet is comprised of fresh water, the rest is salt water. However, two-thirds of this fresh water is to be found in the form of ice and permanent snow. So there really is not much usable water left for us, 6.5 billion human beings!

Lack of water is a crucial problem among the population in large parts of Africa and Asia. Technology to fight this terrible issue exists but its implementation often poses huge problems. In fact, the treatment plants which have been so far developed are mainly large industrial plants for desalination of seawater - a technology which is sophisticated, very costly and highly energy-consuming. It's not surprising that it they are commonly to be found alongside Middle-eastern coasts and in the Gulf's energy-blessed areas. Is a new technology at the horizon?