Water scarcity Water scarcity already affects every continent. Around 1.2 billion people, or almost one-fifth of the world's population, live in areas of physical scarcity, and 500 million people are approaching this situation. Another 1.6 billion people, or almost one quarter of the world's population, face economic water shortage (where countries lack the necessary infrastructure to take water from rivers and aquifers). Water scarcity is among the main problems to be faced by many societies and the World in the XXIst century. Water use has been growing at more than twice the rate of population increase in the last century, and, although there is no global water scarcity as such, an increasing number of regions are chronically short of water. Water scarcity is both a natural and a human-made phenomenon. There is enough freshwater on the planet for six billion people but it is distributed unevenly and too much of it is wasted, polluted and unsustainably managed. Coping with water scarcity. Challenge of the twenty-first century. UN-Water, FAO, 2007 Water scarcity and the MDGs The way water scarcity issues are addressed impacts upon the successful achievement of most of the Millennium Development Goals: MDG 1 : Access to water for domestic and productive uses (agriculture, industry, and other economic activities) has a direct impact on poverty and food security. MDG 2 : Incidence of catastrophic but often recurrent events, such as droughts, interrupts educational attainment. MDG 3 : Access to water, in particular in conditions of scarce resources, has important