EVERY LAST DROP

Every year roughly 100,000 cubic kilometers of rain fall on earth - some 15,000 cubic meters per person per annum. Because the quantity of solar energy that reaches earth is more or less constant, the total amount of water that evaporates also is more or less constant. Because of current levels of population and economic activity, hardly a stream on the planet is now untouched by pollution. [...]the concerns of water managers in many cities today focus on a class of pollutants most water engineers had not heard of fifteen years ago: endocrine disruptors, which form when prescription drugs pass through patient's bodies. What knowledge is available focuses on the presence or absence of infrastructure improvements, but speaks to neither the amount and quality of water available to individuals (even in the aggregate, at a scale useful for planning, such as a district or province level) nor the correlation between water services and water-related diseases. [...]large-scale investments to achieve the Millennium Development Goals for water are still based on making infrastructure available, rather than on putting a service in place or, better still, achieving health.