With the increasing demand for clean water and the steady growth of the world’s population, areas which are already water stressed will get worse, and the amount of water-stressed areas around the world will increase. Though these terms are often used interchangeably, some experts in the field have made a distinction between water scarcity and water stress for the sake of accuracy.

According to the CEO Water Mandate, water scarcity can be defined as the shortage in the physical volume of water in a given region, whereas water stress can is defined as the ability, or lack thereof, to access and meet the necessary human demand for water. For example, an arid region such as Sudan which gets little to no rainfall and has no aquifers or surface water would be experiencing water scarcity due to the sheer lack of volume. However, an area which has a limited supply of freshwater from an aquifer or lake, but is challenged due to the increasing demand of the population or the lack of means to access it efficiently, can be considered a water stressed region.

UNESCO predicts that 1.8 billion people will be experiencing water scarcity and half of the world will be living in water stressed conditions by 2025. Climate change, population growth, agricultural demands, and mismanagement of water resources all contribute to the growing global water crisis. Due to water scarcity, some 24 to 700 million people will be displaced from arid and semi-arid regions of the world.