How Many People Don’t Have Access to Clean Water?

To understand how many people don’t have access to clean water, you first have to understand the water available to the entire globe. Though the earth is covered in water, you cannot drink ocean water without desalinating it, which means removing the salt. There is not yet an efficient way to do this. Most of the remaining fresh water is trapped in the ice caps, and the rest is not evenly distributed or accessible worldwide.[1]

The World Health Organization reports the following staggering facts about the global water crisis:

• Over 2 billion people live in water-stressed countries, which is expected to get worse.
• At least 2 billion people use a drinking water source contaminated with feces.
• Chemical risks in drinking water include arsenic, fluoride or nitrate, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) and microplastics.
• Safe and sufficient water facilitates the practice of hygiene, which prevents not only digestive diseases, as well as acute respiratory infections and numerous neglected tropical diseases.
• Microbiologically contaminated drinking water can transmit digestive diseases, such as cholera, dysentery, typhoid and polio, and is estimated to cause 485,000 deaths each year.[2]