Water Scarcity – An Evolving Sustainability Challenge for Emerging Economies

WATER SCARCITY – AN EVOLVING SUSTAINABILITY CHALLENGE FOR EMERGING ECONOMIES
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Water Scarcity – An Evolving Sustainability Challenge for Emerging Economies
Introduction
Sustainability is a fundamental concern of the global economy today. According to Zhang et al. (2021), emerging economies are struggling with different sustainability challenges, which disturb the social and economic prospects in the long run. One of the significant challenges is water scarcity. Today, the global water crisis is disturbing the planet’s sustainability by compromising natural resources, human habits, and consumption patterns. Arguably, global warming is a natural contributor to the water crisis. However, investigations like Liu et al. (2017) identified that poor irrigation systems and poor water distribution in emerging economies are the few unnatural reasons for the widespread water crisis. This report aims to investigate the notable role of the water crisis as a global sustainability challenge, followed by applying different theories for redesigning and addressing the issue for global economies. Water scarcity influences emerging economies from natural and unnatural paradigms, which environmental regulations must address to avoid long-term sustainability crises.
Discussion
Understanding water scarcity and its sensitivity towards global sustainability are essential for the audience before applying theoretical concepts as solutions. Water scarcity refers to a severe shortage of water due to limited storage, imbalances between availability and consumption, and inadequate supply infrastructure that restrict the accessibility of consumers and businesses (Kellner, 2021). Water scarcity is a significant sustainability challenge for emerging economies today, such as India, Pakistan, and China. The three specified economic structures are dependent on agricultural and manufacturing activities, requiring water as a core resource to maintain the gross domestic product (GDP). However, water scarcity is expanding in the emerging economies for specified reasons, which influence the overall GDPs by disturbing agricultural and manufacturing activities during a fiscal period (Kellner, 2021). Water scarcity is becoming a rising challenge since the emerging economies’ government and environmental regulatory authorities lack the necessary strategies, such as infrastructure solutions, to address the fundamental gaps in short-term sustainability prospects.
Kummu et al. (2016) highlighted critical contributors to global water scarcity, which transform the sustainability pathway throughout the process. First, the researchers blamed the paradigm shifts in the population density that governments ignored deliberately by keeping infrastructure development unaddressed over the decades. Liu et al. (2017) formalized the contributor by implementing the “Falkenmark Indicator.” The research suggests that the per capita water consumption increased abnormally in a few fiscal periods—the increasing gap between demand and supply of water created scarcity. As a result, emerging economies remained dysfunctional towards agricultural activities and contributed to global warming indirectly (Kummu et al., 2016). The road to sustainability challenges initiated due to underperformance in cultivation and industrial activities, which are water-dependent for the emerging economies.
Secondly, the irrigation systems installed in emerging economies, such as the Middle East, African countries, and leading Asian countries, are obsolete to meet contemporary sustainability issues. In recent years, the sustainability parameters evolved due to environmental awareness and shifts in population density. However, governments invested minimally in improving the infrastructures and updating the irrigation systems to meet the paradigm shifts of the sustainability ecosystem (Kummu et al., 2016). As a result, the imbalance incurred between demand and supply of water leads the emerging economies to experience scarcity in the long run.
Lastly, Liu et al. (2017) argued that emerging economies lack renewable acumen to address water distribution. The population density and obsolete irrigation systems in the modern era require renewable strategies to utilize water resources after reprocessing. However, reverse engineering is absent in the emerging economies towards water consumptio...