March 22, is World Water Day, an event established by the United Nations in 1993 to highlight the challenges associated with this precious resource. Each year has a theme, and this year's is "Water and Food Security." The UN estimates that more than one in six people worldwide lack access to 20-50 liters (5-13 gallons) of safe freshwater a day to ensure their basic needs for drinking, cooking, and cleaning. And as the world's population grows beyond 7 billion, clean water is growing scarcer in densely populated areas as well as in remote villages. Collected here are recent images showing water in our lives -- how we use it, abuse it, and depend on it. [36 photos]
An aerial view during a media tour by oil company Royal Dutch Shell shows an illegal oil refining site with the runoff from crude oil covering the banks along the Imo River, 30 km (20 miles) west of Nigeria's oil hub city of Port Harcourt, on September 22, 2011. (Reuters/Akintunde Akinleye)
Water from a leaky fire hose rains down on neighborhood residents as they attempt to put out a fire that had already burned dozens of homes, in the New Building slum neighborhood in central Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, on January 23, 2012. As firefighters struggled to get enough water pressure to make their firehoses work, residents fought the fire with buckets of waste water and used mallets to tear down homes in the fire’s path. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)
World Water Day
via: The Atlantic
World Water Day
via: The Atlantic
