WASHINGTON
(Reuters) -- The number of people living in countries facing severe
water shortages will increase more than four-fold over the next
25 years, according to a report released on Wednesday.
The non-profit
group Population Action International (PAI) projected that by
2025, between 2.4 billion and 3.2 billion people would face severe
or chronic water shortages compared with the 505 million people
affected today.
Researchers
said water shortages would be particularly acute in the Middle
East and in much of Africa.
"While
cause for concern, these figures are an improvement over what
we thought would happen a decade ago," said PAI president
Amy Coen.
"This
is due to the ever-greater proportion of couples planning their
families and the resulting slowing of population growth around
the world," she added.
Lead author
of the report, Robert Engelman said the trend of slower population
growth was a bright spot in an often gloomy picture of increasing
scarcity of natural resources.
However, he
said hundreds of millions of people, most of them in developing
countries, still lacked access to basic health care and family
planning.
"We must
do more to change this, beginning today -- not in some future
decade. People's lives hang in the balance," said Engelman.
Fresh water
is one of six natural resources profiled in the report called
"People in the Balance: Population and Natural Resources
at the Turn of the Millennium."
In other findings,
the report said that an estimated 420 million people lived in
countries with less that 1.7 acres (0.7 hectares) of cultivated
land per person -- considered the bare minimum to supply a vegetarian
diet for one person under absolutely ideal growing conditions.
It predicted
the number of people living in such critically land-scarce countries
would rise to between 557 million and 1.04 billion in 2025.
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