Domestic Water Use by Country

This chart shows Domestic Water Use by Country.

Domestic water use is water used for indoor and outdoor household purposes— all the things you do at home: drinking, preparing food, bathing, washing clothes and dishes, brushing your teeth, watering the yard and garden, and even washing the dog.

Water generally gets to our homes in one of two ways. Either it is delivered by a city/county water department , or people supply their own water, normally from a well. Water delivered to homes is called "public-supplied deliveries" and water that people supply themselves is called "self supplied", and is almost always from groundwater.

Water use can mean the amount of water used by a household or a country, or the amount used for a given task or for the production of a given quantity of some product or crop, or the amount allocated for a particular purpose.Globally, of precipitation falling on land each year,about 4 percent is used by rainfed agriculture and about half is subject to evaporation and transpiration in forests and other natural or quasi-natural landscapes.

There are numerous measures of water use, including total water use, drinking water consumption, non-consumptive use, withdrawn water use , instream use, water footprint, etc. Each of these measures of water use is appropriate for some purposes and inappropriate for others. Water “footprints” have become popular measures of use, e.g. in relation to personal consumption.

Water resources are sources of water that are potentially useful. Uses of water include agricultural, industrial, household, recreational and environmental activities. The majority of human uses require fresh water. 97% of the water on the Earth is salt water and only three percent is fresh water; slightly over two thirds of this is frozen in glaciers and polar ice caps.