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If you think the war for oil is bad, wait till you see the war for wa­ter. The world is go­ing wa­ter-bank­rupt, ac­cord­ing to a UN re­port pub­lished in Jan­u­ary. Glob­al­ly, hu­mans are us­ing wa­ter at a faster rate than na­ture can re­plen­ish it through rain or snow.

It may seem para­dox­i­cal. More than 70 per cent of the Earth is cov­ered by wa­ter. How­ev­er, a mere three per cent of that fig­ure is fresh wa­ter. It gets even more star­tling. Of the per­cent­age of fresh wa­ter, near­ly 69 per cent is locked away in glac­i­ers and ice caps, while rough­ly 30 per cent is ground­wa­ter. That leaves just one per cent ac­ces­si­ble through lakes and rivers.

The pos­si­bil­i­ty of a wa­ter war was first dis­cussed on Fa­reed Za­karia’s GPS pro­gramme in 2015. “Wa­ter is not a re­source that you need to en­hance your life. It is some­thing that you need to sur­vive. To me, that is some­thing that is very easy to lead to sig­nif­i­cant con­flict,” Dr Ronald Roop­nar­ine said in an in­ter­view with the Sun­day Guardian last week.