The animal agriculture industry is well known for being among the most resource-intensive industries on the Earth.

Occupying nearly 45% of the Earth’s total land area, it has estimated how heavily it is contributing to the greenhouse gas emissions problem in the world range from at least 14% to a maximum of 51%.

Previously this month it came to news that a meat company called Tyson Foods, Inc. was a heavier polluter of the US waterways as compared to oil and gas giant ExxonMobil.

The intensive use of freshwater resources by meat and dairy industries has also been associated with prolonged drought in California State.

Official efforts to ease the situation have been focusing on motivating residents to take shorter showers, turn off the faucet while brushing their teeth, and wash their clothes only when they have a full machine load all set to go.

But, these actions are unlikely to make a big impact, because just 4% of the state’s water use footprint belongs to individual household use, and 93% of it, belonging to agricultural activities.

According to the Worldwatch Institute estimations, it takes about 4,200 gallons of water every day to produce the diet of average meat- and dairy-consumer in comparison to nearly 300 gallons for the diet of a plant-based eater making it easy to determine where all the water is going.

Now, a latest report appeared in the Science Advances journal has disclosed that the water scarcity problem in the world is even worse than realized previously.

Earlier it was thought that between 1.7 to 3.1 billion people faced drought at least occasionally, but the authors of the new report Mesfin M. Mekonnen and Arjen Y. Hoekstra have said that earlier studies of the Earth’s drought problem “assessed global water scarcity in physical terms at a high spatial resolution on a yearly time scale … (but) hide the variability within the year and underestimate the extent of water scarcity”.