Halfway to 2015, the year when the globally agreed Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are supposed to be reached, the crisis in water and sanitation as well as in water-resource management remains among the great human development and environmental challenges.
Thursday is World Water Day, and the United Nations is stressing the importance of good governance and proper management of water resources at both international and local levels.
The theme of World Water Day 2007, Coping with Water Scarcity, will require addressing a range of issues, from protection of the environment and global warming to equitable distribution of water for irrigation, industry and household use.
“The state of the world’s waters remains fragile,” stressed UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. “Available supplies are under great duress as a result of high population growth, unsustainable consumption patterns, poor management practices, pollution, inadequate investment in infrastructure, and low efficiency in water-use.”
Enough for all
There is enough water in the world for everyone, but only if it is properly managed, according to the UN.
Slightly more than a billion people do not have access to adequate clean water to meet their basic daily needs, and 2,6-billion do not have proper sanitation, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the UN Children’s Fund.
The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) says that by 2025, 1,8-billion people will be living in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity, and two-thirds of the world’s population could be living under water stress conditions.
Those affected are already among the world’s poorest, with more than half of them living in China and India, according to UN estimates.
Agriculture is the number-one user of water worldwide, accounting for about 70% of all fresh water drawn from lakes, waterways and aquifers around the world. The figure is closer to 90% in several developing countries, where roughly three-quarters of the world’s irrigated farmlands are located.
Water shortages are most acute in the driest areas of the world, according to the FAO.
Most countries in the Near East and North Africa suffer from acute water scarcity, as do countries such as Mexico, Pakistan and South Africa, as well as large parts of China and India.
Water management
“Water use has grown at more than twice the rate of population increase over the last century, making sustainable, efficient and equitable management of scarce water resources a key challenge for the future,” according to the FAO’s Pasquale Steduto, current chairperson of the UN coordination mechanism, UN-Water.
UN-Water is made up of 24 UN agencies that have a significant role in tackling global water concerns and includes major non-UN partners who cooperate with them in advancing progress towards the water-related goals of the Water for Life Decade (2005-2015) and MDGs.
“Sound water-resource management at all levels can help countries adopt flexible approaches that allow more people to have the water they need while preserving the environment,” says Steduto, who also serves as chief of the FAO’s water, development and management unit. “The global community has the know-how to cope with water scarcity, but we have to take action.”
Recognising the vital part fresh water plays in human security and development, the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation, adopted by UN member states at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development, called on countries to develop integrated water-resource management and water-efficiency plans by 2005.
Only about 12% of countries have done so to date, says a 2006 UN-Water report entitled Water: A Shared Responsibility.
Resources
Financial resources for water are also stagnating.
According to the report, total official development assistance to the water sector in recent years has averaged about $3-billion a year. However, only a small proportion — 12% — of these funds reach those most in need, according to UN-Water, and only about 10% is used to support development of water policy, planning and programmes.
Added to the shortfall, private-sector investment in water services is also declining.
During the 1990s, the private sector spent an estimated $25-billion on water supply and sanitation in developing countries, mostly in Latin America and Asia.
However, according to UN-Water, many big multinational water companies have begun withdrawing from or downsizing their operations in the developing world because of the high political and financial risks.
“Water has a major impact on the capacity of people everywhere to improve their lives,” says Steduto.
The FAO points out that even people in areas with plenty of fresh water sometimes experience scarcity.
“Good governance is essential for managing our increasingly stretched supplies of freshwater and indispensable for tackling poverty,” noted Koichiro Matsuura, director general of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco).
Corruption
Although there are no accurate figures, Unesco estimates that political corruption costs the water sector millions of dollars every year and undermines water services, especially to the poor.
Water: A Crisis of Governance, a report published by UN-Water in 2006, cites a survey in India, in which 41% of the respondents had made more than one “small bribe” in the previous six months to falsify metre readings; 30% had made payments to “expedite repair work”; and 12% had made payments to “expedite new water and sanitation connections”.
The report points to “mismanagement, corruption, lack of appropriate institutions, bureaucratic inertia and a shortage of new investments in building human capacity as well as physical infrastructure” as the primary causes of water shortages.
Poor water quality is a key cause of poor livelihood and health.
Globally, diarrhoeral diseases and malaria killed about 3,1-million people in 2002, according to the WHO. Ninety percent of these deaths were children under the age of five.
The WHO estimates that 1,6-million lives could be saved annually by providing access to safe drinking water, sanitation and hygiene.
If the present trends are allowed to continue unchecked, UN-Water warns that regions such as sub-Saharan Africa will not meet the MDG of halving, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water.
The MDG target of halving the proportion of people without basic sanitation will not be met either. — IPS