According to UNICEF, “by 2040, roughly 1 in 4 children worldwide will be living in areas of extremely high-water stress.” OECD has classified water scarcity as a red-light environmental challenge, signaling that it is an environmental issue that “require[s] urgent attention.” Water scarcity poses many challenges to society such as lack of drinking water, inadequate sanitation, and challenges in food production. 

Desalination is the process of removing salts from seawater to produce freshwater for drinking and irrigation. This method is a plausible solution to water scarcity with inexhaustible sources, as 97% of the world’s water supply is salt water. 

The Middle East and North Africa, the most water-stressed regions globally, take up 70% of the 17,000 desalination plants in the world. Over 90% of the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Qatar’s drinking water supply is desalinated water, and over 150 countries are provided with accessible drinking water through desalination. 

However, although desalination is successful in producing more fresh water, the process has its drawbacks. The contamination of seawater and military attacks near the plants can easily cut people off from access to water resources. Oil spills that occur near the coast may enter the plant and result in large amounts of non-potable water. 

While most deaths due to lack of drinking water, inadequate sanitation, and diarrheal diseases occur in developing countries, desalination plants are extremely costly due to their large consumption of energy. Therefore, it does not lessen the burden of areas with the greatest deficiency of water but only provides affluent countries access to more resources. 

Desalination does not convert all extracted seawater into fresh water. Reverse osmosis produces 42% fresh water, and multistage flash distillation, a type of thermal desalination, produces 22% fresh water. The rest is a byproduct called brine, a solution with high concentrations of salt. The high temperature and salinity of the brine compared to the ocean pose threats to marine ecosystems. Substantial amounts of salt sink to the ground, damaging organisms that live near the ocean floor. 

With both its benefits and drawbacks, desalination is a method that can help mitigate the challenge of water scarcity with more cost-effective and eco-friendly advancements. 

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