Just a nifty chart from a recent Economist special report on water.
The basics of the planet's layout when it comes to water.
The bits that always catch your eye:
- Only 2-3% of the water in the world is fresh, or non-salt water
- Of that, much is held in glaciers and ice caps
- Of the tiny fraction that is surface water, most of that is lakes.
The most counter-intuitive for me is that when we talk of water, it's mostly about rivers, but when you check the numbers, rivers are only 1.6% of surface/atmospheric water, which is 0.4 percent of fresh water, which is 2.5% of the world's water.
The other big counterintuitive reality: domestic use of water is peanuts compared to agricultural.