SAN FRANCISCO -- More than 76 million people, mainly children, will die from water-related diseases by 2020 unless urgent action is taken to clean up the planet's water supplies, according to a report issued.

The Pacific Institute of Oakland, California, in a report issued in advance of this month's Earth Summit in Johannesburg, said the projected death toll due to dirty water could outstrip the number of lives lost to the global AIDS pandemic over the next two decades, Reuters reported.

"As many as 76 million people -- mainly children -- will die from preventable, water-related diseases by 2020 even if current united nations goals are reached," said Peter H.

Gleick, director of the Nonprofit Policy Research Institute.

The United Nations now says that some 1.2 billion people around the globe live without access to safe water and 2.5 billion are without sanitation, vulnerable to deadly diseases ranging from diarrhea and dysentery to cholera, typhoid and insect-borne illness.

The Pacific Institute report examined three different scenarios and concluded that even if United Nations goals to halve the proportion of people without access to clean drinking water are met, between 34 and 76 million people could still perish over the next twenty years.

The World Health Organization, in a report issued in 2000, estimated that there are already four billion cases of diarrhea each year, killing as many as five million people.