The final one of the world's three big water problems is waste.

In North America our wealth has permitted us to simply to take, and waste, quantities of water which would be considered obscene elsewhere. In rainy North Vancouver, Canada (the home of this web site) unit water average use is about 650 litres/capita/day or lcd. This rises, on peak summer days, to an incredible 1,500 lcd. Individual home connections here are un-metered, because any water savings due to conservation would, for most of the year, simply run into the sea.

Even in drier parts of North America, huge quantities of water are squandered on household swimming pools and landscape irrigation, with summer unit consumption in Los Angeles being in the 1000 lcd range.

But it is not only here that water is wasted.

Across the irrigated lands of North Africa, and the Middle and Far East, water has been distributed at such low cost for so long that those well placed to take water freely from public canals and pipe systems still do so. Even in Jordan, one of the least naturally well endowed countries in the world, between 60 and 70% of the nation's fresh water resource is used inefficiently, and far too small a fraction of the urban wastewater is fully treated and recycled for irrigation