Imagine waking up one morning and finding no water in your kitchen, or the bathroom. There’s no water flowing from taps anywhere in the house. It happens again and again, every day, for an entire month.

If you live in Toronto, it’s hard to imagine.

But more than 4 billion people — almost two-thirds of the world’s population — deal with severe water scarcity for at least one month every year, says a new study published in the journal Science Advances Friday.

Nearly half of those people live in China and India. Millions more live in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mexico and the United States — in states like California, Texas and Florida.

Of that total, half a billion people face water severe shortages all year round, says the study.

These numbers are far worse than previously believed. Earlier studies had said scarcity hits 1.7 to 3.1 billion people.

The study’s authors, two water experts at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, said they weren’t shocked by their findings. It is clear “that water scarcity is a serious risk factor to our global economy, something that many people still don’t recognize,” said lead author Arjen Y. Hoekstra.

Even those who don’t live in water-scarce places can be indirectly affected “because they may depend on food from those areas,” he said.

For this study, the researchers compared water usage to local water availability month by month, not on an annual basis as in the previous studies.

The reason why more than 4 billion people live precariously for at least one month every year is uncomplicated: a growing population has created more demand for food and our consumption habits have changed rapidly.

For instance, a meal with meat is much more water-intensive than one without it.

Then there is an increasing demand for biofuels, made from thirsty crops like corn or sugarcane.

All if this “makes our economy increasingly water-intensive,” said Hoekstra.

The problem isn’t just depleted reservoirs and barren riverbeds; more than 95 per cent of Earth’s liquid freshwater is stored in underground aquifers, and this groundwater is being used far more quickly than it is being replenished.

Global water crises — from droughts in the most productive farmlands to the hundreds of millions of people without access to safe drinking water — are the biggest threats facing us, the World Economic Forum said in its 2015 report.

Scarcity of water has been cited by experts as a cause for conflict.

A recent and high-profile example is Syria, where experts at the Center for Climate and Security in Washington said the wretched drought that wreaked havoc in that country between 2006 and 2010 may have helped trigger the 2011 revolution there.

It has since evolved into a complex war that has killed more than 470,000 people, displaced millions and now involves many countries.

For co-author Mesfin M. Mekonnen, solving scarcity is a complex question.

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“How communities deal with (water scarcity) depends on factors like development status and the availability of proper institutions, like food storage systems, the existence of social security systems.”

It isn’t a problem that can be wished away, said Hoekstra.

Governments, he said, need to ensure that water consumption “doesn’t exceed maximum sustainable levels … companies should invest in their operations and supply chains to reduce water use, and consumers could reconsider their consumption pattern.”

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