During the twentieth century, global water withdrawal increased by a factor of six, i.e. more than twice the rate of population growth; extrapolating developments during the last five years of that period for the hundred years to come results in an annual extraction twenty-three times the current level. But already the present yearly use of around 5000 km3 represents more than half of the amount readily available to humans; this resource is unequally distributed around the globe and seriously compromised by wastage, pollution, deforestation, land degradation and lowering water tables. If current trends persist, by 2025 at least 3.5bn people or 48% of the world population will live in “water-stressed” conditions, that is, experience severe water scarcity and gravely strained aquatic ecosystems. To arrest this development, UN members, at the Johannesburg Summit in 2002, agreed to employ methods of efficient river-basin management by 2005, and in March 2006, at a meeting of water legislators during the Fourth World Water Forum, declared water to be “a property of the public domain” rather than a commodity, and access to it possibly a human right.

Current efforts to identify transferable solutions also focus on European resource management, particularly on national approaches to operating and charging for water and infrastructure investments as well as the EU's Water Framework Directive (WFD). The latter is said to facilitate integrated, economic river-basin management while considering water a non-commodity. But Europe does not offer simple answers either.