Many countries around the world suffer from increasing degradation in the quality of their natural land-water and aquatic water resources, e.g. lakes, rivers, coastal maritime and in some cases groundwater, because of growing net accumulation of pollution and waste in the environment. As explained in separate post (http://sustain-earth.com/2014/10/life-on-planet-earth-until-2100-double-e-global-collapse-in-economy-and-ecology/) the net global waste is expected to peak sometime at the end of this century.
In parallel to this there is a gradual and increasing degradation in the global quality of natural land-water and aquatic water resources with serious negative feedback impacts on the quality of all life forms on the Earth. So sometime at the turn of this century or early twenty-second century we may expect peak ecological water quality (http://pacinst.org/issues/sustainable-water-management-local-to-global/peak-water/) to materialize. This of course assuming that trends in waste production/recycling will follow the scenarios of the “Nature” paper given in the mentioned post. Also, this is assuming that the collapse of life on earth will not occur already before peak ecological water quality and the delay-effects will give some space to perform remediation and correction measures. There are observations and data in literature illustrating that the degradation in ecological water quality and the associated collapse (frequency and intensity) in ecological systems have already taken place in a growing number of geographical regions. Peak “ecological” water is defined as the point beyond which the total costs of ecological disruptions and damages exceed the total value provided by human use of that water. Unfortunately, the quality of tap water is very much related to the quality of “raw” water, i.e. the natural water of aquatic systems. We have already seen that achieving suitable tap water quality, even acceptable quality bottled water, are not any longer an easily affordable task.