To live and work in the UAE is to believe water is plentiful. A fair amount of green, especially in Al Ain and Abu Dhabi. Fountains. Plenty of the stuff streaming out of our taps.

Which is madness, because the UAE is on the edge of one of the driest deserts in the world, and the annual rainfall — just about anywhere in the Gulf region — is about 2 inches per year. Maybe.

Southern California is, by comparison, practically a swamp, with its 15 or 16 inches of rain annually.

Low-flow showers, toilets, dishwashers … essentially unknown here. And the UAE continues to try to raise its own food stuffs despite the staggering amounts of water needed to grow anything here. Some suggest that 80 percent of the country’s water goes to the puny agriculture sector.

The National has run numerous stories about the water profligacy coming to an end, and the dangers if it does not.

Some sobering statistics:

–The UAE, overall, is thought to have three days of water on hand. Kuwait, considered a leader in storing water, has six days. If desalination plants go down, via attack or failure, we are in enormous trouble here.

–Most residents of the UAE do not pay for water. No connection exists linking water wastage with economic pain. Not on the household level, anyway.

–Nearly all water in the Gulf comes from desalination plants, and the disposal of all that salt is a huge environmental issue. The choices pretty much are to pump the briny slush back into the increasingly salty (and dead) Gulf … or bury it on land and risk contaminating what limited underground water is available.

In this think piece, one of our writers goes over a book entitled The Big Thirst, which predicts a water crisis globally, and soon.  The Wall Street Journal reviewed the book a year ago.

The author of the book suggests that water and its real cost needs to be made clear to consumers, and that is how the crisis will be resolved.

Some movers and shakers in the Gulf grasp that they have an issue here … even if very little has been done yet.

In this story in The National, more dire predictions and observations are made, most of them specific to the Gulf, and a call is made for a regional research center to study the problem. That may not seem like a quick solution, but would be more than is going on now.

When it comes to water, we here live in Neverland. It never falls from the sky, we never think about it and the problem never will be fixed until it is confronted.