Water Shortage and Desalination Plants

Water shortage has been going on for decades in different parts of the world. People in poor countries have been facing this shortage for their whole lives and maybe they will if nothing is done. Clean and safe drinking water is just a dream for hundreds of millions of people around the world, especially and specifically in poor countries. The problem can be many, but the main ones are the population growth, finite financial resources and finite water sources, Global warming (the favorite of the environmentalists), wastage of water on a large scale.

Although it is not a novel idea, but the government in Australia is constructing desalination plants to extract water from the sea, since Australia, being the driest continent in the world is always facing drought or drought like conditions. Here again there are two sides to the story. On the one hand are the environmentalists who argue that it harms the environment, since most of the electricity used for the desalination plants comes from coal in Australia and on the other there is a dire need to use water. If you can’t have enough water or rainfall in your area, what else is there to get water from? Ground or well water is of no use, since the negligible rainfall can’t refill the ground supply. The only way for the coastal areas is to get the desalination plants.