The study, released Tuesday, gave a litany of problems extending to severe pollution, species loss, and even food insecurity.

"Freshwater shortages are likely to trigger increased environmental damage over the next 15 years," noted the UN Environmental Program's Global International Waters Assessment (GIWA) report, based on the input of 1,500 experts worldwide.

Inadequate potable water is an immediate problem for billions of people, it said. Some 1.1 billion people go without safe drinking water and 2.6 billion, or 40 percent of the world's population, lack decent sanitation, according to UN figures.

But freshwater shortages caused by massive damming and depleted aquifers are provoking a chain reaction of environmental problems as well, beginning with falls in river flows, rising saltiness in biologically-rich estuaries, and the reduction in coastline sediment. The knock-on impact of these changes, the study predicted, will be a serious loss of fish and aquatic plant life, shrinking farmland, damage to fisheries and food insecurity by the year 2020.

At the end of the chain of consequences, it said, are increases in malnutrition and disease.

The report's release coincides with the Fourth World Water Forum, which opened on March 16 in Mexico City and culminates Wednesday on World Water Day, designated 13 years ago by the UN General Assembly.

"In recent decades, water has fallen in our esteem," said a statement on the website of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the UN agency chosen to coordinate this year's World Water Day when events will be organized around the globe to celebrate this vital resource.

"No longer an element to be revered and protected, it is a consumer product that we have shamefully neglected," it said.

For 2006, UNESCO chose as its theme "water and culture", echoing one of the battle cries of experts at the forum in Mexico that decentralizing water management and returning to traditional methods is the "intelligent" way to reform.

"Technology alone ... will not lead us to viable solutions," said a statement from UNESCO director general Koichiro Matsuura.

"It is vital that water management and governance take cultural traditions, indigenous practices and societal values into serious account" to reach "sustainable solutions that contribute to equity, peace and development", he said.

Among factors aggravating the world's water problems are changing patterns in human food consumption, according to the GIWA report.

"Globally, there has been an increased demand for agricultural products and a trend towards more water-intensive food such as meat rather than vegetables and fruits rather than cereals," the study concludes.

Irrigated agriculture now accounts for 70 percent of freshwater withdrawals, with only 30 percent returned to the environment, studies have shown. Industry and households, by comparison, return up to 90 percent of the water used.

The fact that many developing countries do not have adequate scientific or technical information about their water supplies is an aggravating factor.

Such nations are "operating in the dark on the size of their water resource, and the precise patterns of supply and demand," the study said.

The study also points the finger at "market failures", noting that many factors contributing to environmental degradation and pollution -- including use of pesticides and herbicide, water for irrigation, dam construction -- are heavily subsidized by governments.

Areas already severely affected, it said, include some of the world's most scenic locations including Southeast Asian sites, Caribbean coral reefs and river habitats and east African rift Valley lakes.

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