Introduction
Seventy-one percent of the Earth’s surface is covered by water. Water resources total up to 1,386,000,000 km3 in volume. This amount is essentially constant; only the form and the quality of the water change with the water cycle. Oceans contain 96.5% of the Earth’s water resources, other forms of saltwater take up an additional 1%, while freshwater amounts only to 2.5%. Moreover, of the total quantity of freshwater, only 1.2% is surface water; other sources of it are locked in glaciers and ice caps (68.7%) or in the form of groundwater (30.1%) (USGS 2016). For humans, only a fracture of surface waters is accessible in lakes, rivers, reservoirs, and specific forms of underground resources, amounting to ca. 93,113 km3, or 0.007% of the total water resources of the Earth (Singh and Sharma 2014).
Drinking water is typically obtained from surface or underground sources, and in both cases, it is exposed to several sources of pollution – which may reduce the quantity of drinking...
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Szálkai, K. (2019). Drinking Water. In: Romaniuk, S., Thapa, M., Marton, P. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Global Security Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74336-3_529-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74336-3_529-1
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