A report issued on the eve of the first major UN conference on water in more than 45 years says 26 percent of the world’s population does not have access to safe drinking water and 46 percent lacks access to basic sanitation.
The UN World Water Development Report 2023, released on Tuesday, painted a stark picture of the huge gap that needs to be filled to meet UN goals to ensure all people have access to clean water and sanitation by 2030.
Richard Connor, editor-in-chief of the report, told a news conference that the estimated cost of meeting the goals is between US$600 billion and US$1 trillion a year.
Photo: AP
However, equally important is forging partnerships with investors, financiers, governments and climate change communities to ensure that money is invested in ways to sustain the environment and provide potable water to the 2 billion people who do not have it and sanitation to the 3.6 million in need, he said.
Water use has been increasing globally by about 1 percent per year over the past 40 years “and is expected to grow at a similar rate through 2050, driven by a combination of population growth, socioeconomic development and changing consumption patterns,” the report says.
Connor said that actual increase in demand is happening in developing countries and emerging economies where it is driven by industrial growth, especially by the rapid increase in the population of cities.
With agriculture using 70 percent of all water globally, irrigation for crops has to be more efficient — as it is in some countries that now use drip irrigation, which saves water, he said.
“That allows water to be available to cities,” he said.
As a result of climate change, “seasonal water scarcity will increase in regions where it is currently abundant — such as Central Africa, East Asia and parts of South America — and worsen in regions where water is already in short supply, such as the Middle East and the Sahara in Africa,” the report says.
On average, “10 percent of the global population lives in countries with high or critical water stress,” and up to 3.5 billion people live under conditions of water stress at least one month a year, the report says.
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