Our groundwater is being used up at record rates and claims to ownership are becoming increasingly contentious. It won't be long before the first water war begins. 

There's a lot of water on the planet we inhabit – an estimated 326 million trillion gallons or 1,260,000,000,000,000,000,000 liters. 

That makes it hard to believe that there are somewhere between 780 million to 1 billion people without basic and reliable water supplies and that more than two billion people lack the requirements for basic sanitation. 

Harder still to believe are reports water is going to get much dearer in our near term future – yet Peter Voser the chief executive of the world's second-largest energy company, Royal Dutch Shell, warned us in June 2011, that global demand for fresh water may outstrip supply by as much as 40% in 20 years if current fresh-water consumption trends continue. 

Our planet is 70% covered in ocean, 98% of the world’s water is in the oceans – which makes it unfit for drinking or irrigation because of salt. 

Just 2% of the world’s water is fresh, but the vast majority of our fresh water, 1.6%, is in its frozen state and locked up in the polar ice caps and glaciers. 

Our available freshwater (.396% of total supply) is found underground in aquifers and wells (0.36%) and the rest of our readily available fresh water, 0.036%, is found in lakes and rivers. 

Aquifers 

Freshwater aquifers are one of the most important natural resources in the world today, but in recent decades the rate at which we’re pumping them dry has more than doubled. The amount of water pumped has gone from 126 to 283 cubic kilometers per year – if water was pumped as rapidly from the Great Lakes they would be dry in roughly 80 years. 

These fast shrinking underground reservoirs are essential to life on this planet.....