Is there enough fresh water on the planet?

In this article we provide an overview of the available drinking water on the planet, the ways to preserve it, as well as address and seek to answer the questions that usually come to mind when we think about global warming and the scarcity of drinking water:

• Is the water at the poles all we have available from now on?

• Is there any way to make sea water drinkable?

• We are disrupting the water cycle so much that we are breaking it?

While it is true that climate change is bringing us serious problems regarding ocean warming, coral bleaching, increasingly powerful and long-lasting hurricanes, melting of poles and glaciers, as well as temperatures in warmer or colder ranges in cities not planned for it, it is not precisely climate change that is the cause of "the extinction of fresh water", but then, what is happening with drinking water and climate change? We tend to think that climate change will leave us without water, and in many places this is already happening, just as it is a natural thought to consider that the only source of drinking water available are the reserves of the poles and glaciers, and although this represents 90% of the total fresh water, we still have 0.5% coming from aquifers, and 0.3% from rivers, lakes and lagoons. Have you ever thought what would happen to that water that we would "no longer have" due to climate change?

This is where 0.3% of all drinking water on the planet and the water cycle come into play:

Let's see that 0.3% not as a reserve, which it is, but as a transfer channel, the water cycle at its best:

Cold water comes from the melting of the poles to the ocean, but it becomes salinized and turns into cold and salty water; these cold waters are transported by ocean currents until, at some point and gradually, they reach a higher temperature, thus emerging to the surface as warm waters, which at some point of the year will become evaporation and yes, later on, rains, storms or hurricanes generated offshore and, many, with catastrophic impacts on land.

So that 0.3% is fed directly by the water from the poles? The answer is yes, but also no:

This evaporation water in the water cycle, which is currently not concretely measured, comes from different sources:

• Evaporation of sea water (water from the poles or simply tides)

• Condensation of atmosphere in fog or high mountain forests

• Melting of our great friends, the glaciers, to create rivers that, in turn, also generate evaporation in addition to their continuous flow.

Do you remember that 90% of all fresh water is at the poles, 0.5% comes from aquifers, and 0.3% from rivers, lakes and lagoons?

Where is the remaining 9.2% and why is it not mentioned? Can that water also be lost?

Part of that 9.2% is in the air we breathe and the atmosphere, but the rest of the 9.2% is simply not well located. Why? It's simple: we have not developed anything really reliable to measure evaporation in the large areas of ocean and know the real volume that the oceans are providing us to feed the water cycle.

Starting from such a great lack of knowledge, and knowing that 90% of water used by humans is dumped without treatment into freshwater rivers, we realize that we do not need more freshwater nor desalination plants, which generate significant energy and monetary consumption (in the most efficient processes, "producing a liter of drinking water costs 2 liters of seawater) , when it is not that we are "running out" of water, but that:

The water cycle is slowing down, degrading or, in some places on the planet, breaking down: that water is no longer flowing and being made drinkable naturally, it is no longer being captured through evaporation and rain, the necessary mineralization in rivers and aquifers is being contaminated and interrupted, and areas with high water demands are simply generating an imbalance, which means that the oceans cannot continue sending us water via evaporation if we do not first return it to them in a healthy way.

We need to take care of the water we already have, because the volume will not change, but its potability or percentage of use will, since we have currently reached alarming levels of contamination which, even with the existing reserves, put us in considerable trouble by contaminating our own reserves. It is absolutely urgent to begin to preserve the water cycle and rebuild it where it has been broken, to capture rainwater that can provide us with Dantesque volumes of ocean water, to river water, which nourishes our forests, basins and gives us temperate climates in areas far from the coast and, as a fundamental piece: to correctly reintegrate into the cycle, water for human consumption (industrial and civil), which is precisely what is leading us to degrade the water cycle at a global level more rapidly.