Taza Water Bottling Plant

With rising population growth and global climate change putting stress on the consumable 1% of the planet’s water, the global water crisis may just be the most critical threat facing our existence on earth. With his Facing Water Crisis project, Dallas-based photographer Balazs Gardi takes the issue head on. In his words:

The unfolding water crisis is causing social tensions and tribal to regional clashes all over the globe at an unimaginable scale. This project began as a personal photographic quest to understand the magnitude and the complexity of the most critical threat mankind has ever faced. Facing Water Crisis intends to gather stories and evidence with like-minded collaborators reporting from the ground and aims to connect people in different parts of the world, from different social and political backgrounds, and from different economic strata, to convey the urgency of our common situation by establishing an interdisciplinary hub of shared knowledge.

In this hypnotic video, the intrepid Gardi — who spent several years embedded with a U.S. Marine batallion in Afghanistan — goes behind the scenes at the Taza water bottling plant in the Maldives, where access to potable water is essentially non-existent. 

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