Water Needs for the Future (By Ved P. Nanda)

Although the importance of water as a natural resource has long been recognized in the arid Western states and in the Middle East, recent disastrous droughts in the African Sahel region, and the United Kingdom have focused worldwide attention on the fact that inadequate supplies of water are a major international problem. Indeed, the specter of a "water crisis" akin to the much discussed energy crisis has been raised, with a warning from the U.S. Secretary of the Interior of possible cutbacks in residential construction and a decline in the quality of drinking water by the late 1980's. Water Needs for the Future, which is a refinement of a series of papers presented at the University of Denver College of Law in late 1976, admirably serves the dual purposes of presenting the scope of the problem, and describing the current legal, economic and technological factors which must be considered to formulate a national and international water policy.