WASHINGTON, July 7 — More than 2 billion people around the world face water scarcity, according to the United Nations. That number is only expected to grow. The World Resources Institute projects that by 2040, 33 countries will experience extremely high water stress.
For a problem this vast, there is no single fix — but a set of technologies is quietly scaling up to help. Think of it like this: the world is essentially running multiple plays at once to stretch its freshwater supply.
Desalination is the biggest and most established of them. It already produces over 100 million cubic meters of freshwater every day globally. The leaders in this space are Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Israel — countries that have turned a survival necessity into an industrial-scale operation.
The workhorse of modern desalination is reverse osmosis. Developed in the 1950s and commercialized in the 1970s, it now accounts for about 60% of all desalination capacity worldwide.
The basic idea is simple: push saltwater through a membrane that lets only water molecules through, leaving the salt behind. The practical upshot is that it has driven costs down dramatically. Israel’s Sorek desalination plant is a case in point.
Operational since 2013, it produces 624,000 cubic meters per day at a cost of $0.40 per cubic meter. That price point has made desalination a realistic option for municipal water supply, not just an emergency backup. But desalination is not the only game in town.
Advanced water recycling has become a major force, particularly in places where natural water is scarce. The Orange County Water District’s Groundwater Replenishment System in California has been operating since 2008 and now produces 130 million gallons per day.
That water is treated to near-distilled quality and then injected into the local aquifer, where it mixes with groundwater before being pumped out again for drinking. It is, in effect, a closed-loop system that reuses water indefinitely. There is also a newer category of technology that feels almost like science fiction: atmospheric water generators.
These machines extract moisture directly from the air. Watergen, a company founded in 2009, makes units that can produce up to 5,000 liters of water per day.
For places where building pipelines or desalination plants is impractical — remote villages, disaster zones, military outposts — this offers a decentralized alternative. The global desalination market reflects the growing appetite for these solutions. It was valued at $17.8 billion in 2022 and is expected to reach $35.2 billion by 2032, according to Allied Market Research.
That is a compound annual growth rate that signals serious investment, not just niche interest. The scale of the installed base is already enormous. The International Desalination Association reports that as of 2023, there were over 20,000 desalination plants operating worldwide.
That number includes everything from massive municipal facilities down to small industrial units. The practical upshot for ordinary readers is that water scarcity is not a future problem — it is a present one, and the technology to address it is already deployed at scale.
The question is not whether these technologies work, but how fast they can be rolled out to the 33 countries projected to face extreme water stress by 2040. In plain terms, the world is building a diversified water portfolio. Desalination, recycling, and air capture each have their own economics and their own best-use scenarios.
The countries that figure out how to combine them efficiently will be the ones that keep their taps running.
