1. Water scarcity and security problem

Earth may be the water planet, but 97% of its water is in oceans. Most of the remainder is locked in Antarctic icecaps or deep underground, leaving less than 1% available for human use. But the 1% is just theoretical, because groundwater makes up almost all of the available freshwater, while rivers and lakes, representing the main sources for human consumption, contain only 0.006% of global liquid freshwater.
Do such numbers reflect that we human beings are now suffering from extreme water scarcity? The answer is no. Even though the percentage of fresh water is tiny compared to the whole global water integrity, the absolute value of river flow is huge. Planet earth’s hydrological system pumps and transfers about 44,000 km3 of water to the land each year, equivalent to 6,900 m3 for everyone on the planet. Even though the majority of people on the planet do not have access to this real amount of freshwater because a large part of its flow is accounted for by uncontrollable flood waters, or it is located in locations too remote for effective human use, but the world has far more water than the 1,700 cubic meters per person minimum threshold that hydrologists by convention treat as the amount needed to grow food, support industries and maintain the environment.
Then what is the cause of water scarcity? Undoubtedly, it is because of inequitable water distribution. The international average amount of water is a largely irrelevant number. The problem is that some countries get a lot more than others. Almost a quarter of the world’s supply of fresh water is in Lake Baikal in sparsely populated Siberia.
Today, about 700 million people in 43 countries live below the water-stress threshold. The Middle East is the world’s most water-stressed region; by 2025 more than 3 billion people could be living in water-stressed countries—and 14 countries will slip from water stress to water scarcity.
There are growing tensions between rich and poor nations due to inequitable distribution and use of water resources. While the attention of most political scientists interested in the links between resources and conflict has focused on non-renewable mineral resources such as rare metals and oil, some renewable resources such as water may also pose comparable risks to international peace in the future. Such scenarios would contribute to tensions between water-poor and water-rich nations and could be the source of future conflict.
​ Moreover, as improving standards of living increase the demand for fresh water, and as global climatic changes make the water supply and demand more problematic and uncertain, the links between water and conflicts appears more tangible than past, and the water related conflicts are more likely to occur.