What is the Importance of Water?
The Earth is composed of 75% water. It is regarded as one of the basic fundamentals for life to support on Earth. Water is considered to be the primary building block for any kind of ecosystem (Nazemi and Wheater 2015). The direct need of water for all living organisms is that it plays an important role within the lives of every single individual.
Water is needed for all forms of lives to exist on the planet. The many uses of water would include industrial, agriculture, household, recreational and different forms of environmental activities (Voisin et al. 2013). The changes in the climate would also have significant impacts on water resources from all parts of the world. This is due to the reason of the closer connections between the hydrologic cycle and climate. Water could also be considered to be critical for different economic sectors. Lakes, rivers and oceans help in providing natural highways based on commercial navigation. They also provide places for swimming, fishing and other activities for recreation and tourism. On environmental factors, water would be important for maintaining a healthy, resilient and productive river system based on providing benefits to different living organisms.
Water plays a major role for the hygienic state of individuals. Water is primarily used by humans for cleansing clothes, maintenance of a healthy environment, food habits and many others. The agricultural sector also makes vital use of water for their different purposes such as irrigation, growing of crops and many other factors (Kunz and Moran 2014). Water forms a major factor for the nourishment of crops. It also plays a major role for maintaining the optimum health of crops and farm livestock. This helps in the production of many kind of products.
With the use of water for various aspects of navigation, the waterways play a major role in the areas of transportation. The energy gained from water would also be maintained for producing power and electricity (Luckmann et al. 2014). Some other places where water would be able to generate an important role would be within the steel industry, generation of thermal power, fertilizers, mining, chemicals, cement, fire protection, air conditioning and many others.
There is a great need of water supply in the hydroelectric dams and thermoelectric power plants. The high amount of supply of water would be needed for the purpose of generation of power. Based on such types of considerations, water could be used for several chemical processes because water could mostly be used as a solvent (Awaleh and Soubaneh 2014). Water is also mostly used as a dissolver of numerous substances of every kind. Thus, water is regarded as a ‘universal solvent’. Water is considered to be a universal solvent due to the high form of dissolving capabilities of any kind of substance.
A good example of the use of water in industries is based on iron smelting. Water is mainly used within the industries for the processing of raw materials. Many other kind of industries that mainly make use of water are based on the wood, food production, chemicals, gasoline, metals and many others. The different kinds of industries that produce various kinds of materials make use of water at some point of their production.
Benefits of Water
From the different considerations about the various uses of water and the ways it helps in serving the variant needs of the individuals, it could be considered that water is a primary source of life. With the several form of advancements in the technical field and overuse of petroleum, oil and electric resources, water has been viewed with a positive intake and also as a stable form of source of energy. The powering of hydropower stations would be directly proportional to the supply of water that is taken by these stations (Ansar et al. 2014). Hydroelectric power is considered as a source of energy that would be located everywhere. This would be possible in such areas that would be capable of producing the amount of energy that would be needed by them. This would thus help in the creation of a less demand on the international sources of fuel.
There is a huge form of danger with the effect of polluted water within the lives of various living organisms. It is extremely necessary to ensure the purity of water based on the purpose of saving millions of lives (Verma and Dwivedi 2013). Humans have the major form of responsibility to ensure that the water would be clean, pollution free and safe to consume.
Potable water is considered to be the form of water that could be consumed by humans. There are different steps by which water can be purified, which could then be consumed by humans. Some of the processes in which water can be purified are – boiling, chlorine drops, iodine solutions, ultraviolet and water filter (Lin et al. 2014). The different ways of purifying water would be extremely necessary in order to make the water ready for people to consume.
Water resources are considered to be natural form of resources that are potentially useful for all living organisms on Earth. Fresh water is considered to be a natural resource. The supply of groundwater is decreasing steadily. This form of depletion in the amount of water is prominent in South America, Asia and North America. Water is considered as an important resource for life to exist on the planet. The change in the conditions of climate would have significant impacts on the resources of water (Haddeland et al. 2014). Due to the expanding form of human populations based on competition of water, many of the aquifers of water are becoming depleted. Some of the primary resources of water are groundwater, rain water and surface water.
The existence of groundwater would primarily exist in such places that would be negligible to the human eye. The presence of groundwater is under the surface of land or rocks. These rocks would be referred as aquifers and their primary function would be to store and diffuse groundwater. The percentage of groundwater is composed of 33% of potable water that would be mainly supplied to public for their use (Jackson et al. 2013). The groundwater is considered to be the water that would flow through shallow aquifers.
References
Ansar, A., Flyvbjerg, B., Budzier, A. and Lunn, D., 2014. Should we build more large dams? The actual costs of hydropower megaproject development. Energy Policy, 69, pp.43-56.
Awaleh, M.O. and Soubaneh, Y.D., 2014. Waste water treatment in chemical industries: the concept and current technologies. Hydrology: Current Research, 5(1), p.1.
Haddeland, I., Heinke, J., Biemans, H., Eisner, S., Flörke, M., Hanasaki, N., Konzmann, M., Ludwig, F., Masaki, Y., Schewe, J. and Stacke, T., 2014. Global water resources affected by human interventions and climate change. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(9), pp.3251-3256.
Jackson, R.E., Gorody, A.W., Mayer, B., Roy, J.W., Ryan, M.C. and Van Stempvoort, D.R., 2013. Groundwater protection and unconventional gas extraction: The critical need for field?based hydrogeological research. Groundwater, 51(4), pp.488-510.
Kunz, N.C. and Moran, C.J., 2014. Sharing the benefits from water as a new approach to regional water targets for mining companies. Journal of cleaner production, 84, pp.469-474.
Lin, W., Yu, Z., Zhang, H. and Thompson, I.P., 2014. Diversity and dynamics of microbial communities at each step of treatment plant for potable water generation. Water research, 52, pp.218-230.
Luckmann, J., Grethe, H., McDonald, S., Orlov, A. and Siddig, K., 2014. An integrated economic model of multiple types and uses of water. Water Resources Research, 50(5), pp.3875-3892.
Nazemi, A., & Wheater, H. S. (2015). On inclusion of water resource management in Earth system models–Part 1: Problem definition and representation of water demand. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 19(1), 33-61.
Verma, R. and Dwivedi, P., 2013. Heavy metal water pollution-A case study. Recent research in science and technology, 5(5).
Voisin, N., Li, H., Ward, D., Huang, M., Wigmosta, M. and Leung, L.R., 2013. On an improved sub-regional water resources management representation for integration into earth system models. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 17(9), pp.3605-3622.
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