ENERGY & UTILITIES
LET’S
SOLVE WATER
With a vast portfolio of leading-edge solutions, Xylem’s recently unified Africa division is united in its ambition to safeguard the continent’s most precious (and scarce) resource Writer: Tom Wadlow | Project Manager: Donovan Smith
S
oaring human demand for water has created a crisis. Despite covering almost 70 percent of the earth, we rely on the 2.5 percent of water which is fresh, and 99 percent of that is not easily accessible, the majority being trapped in glaciers and snowfields. Indeed, it is fascinating to consider that the water we drink today has likely existed in one form or another for hundreds of millions of years, a resource once consumed by dinosaurs who roamed the earth. Since then the amount of freshwater on our planet has remained fairly constant, recycled through the atmosphere and back onto earth countless times to fuel and feed all forms of life. Innovation through the ages,
from Archimedes’ Screw and Roman aqueducts to turbines and distillation techniques, have enabled humans to make the most out of water, the leveraging of which has fuelled industrial and agrarian revolutions all over the world. But there is a problem. The last two centuries have witnessed a population explosion unlike anything seen in civilizational history – in 1800 there were a little under 990 million people on earth, whereas today that figure reads closer to 7.8 billion. Africa is home to around 1.33 billion people, or 16.7 percent of the global population. Most estimates agree that at current growth rates (around 2.5 percent a year), the continent will have to support double the number of inhabitants by as early as 2050. Africa Outlook issue 83 | 91
