Even U.S. Not Immune From Growing World Wide Water Shortages

(AHN) - A film that details the urgency of dealing with the world's increasing shortage of water won critical acclaim at this year's Environmental Film Festival and is helping to publicize grass-roots solutions to the problem.

"Flow: For Love of Water" highlights the fact that one sixth of the world's population lacks access to clean drinking water, a problem that results in more than 2 million people, primarily children, being killed by water-borne diseases each year.

Even in places such as India, access to clean water is a problem. And shortages of safe water aren't confined to third-world undeveloped countries. In the United States, a harmful chemical that was banned in Europe is still in use and is finding its way into stormwater runoff that pollutes some of the nation's drinking water sources.

In some places, there is simply a shortage of any water. Higher populations in places such as California, the Atlanta, Georgia area and south Florida have put a strain on water resources in each of those places.

South Florida placed strict water restrictions on customers this summer to keep water flowing from faucets.

In the Atlanta area, officials watched the region's drinking water reservoir run almost dry, then during a fight with Florida to try to boost reservoir levels by cutting downstream river flow, Georgia officials learned the reservoir wasn't designed to be used by the Atlanta area. That left them grappling with how to ensure water for the needs of the residents into the future.

In California, the problem is a little more distant. Officials there say that unless a solution is found that the state will not have enough water to meet its needs in 20 years.

Reasons for the water shortage are varied and include an attitude that the world can't run out of safe, clean water, the film reportedly shows. Global warming is also having an effect. But some of the biggest problems are an increasing demand and the way water is used, which includes polluting it, diverting it and misusing it.