Prologue: the state of water resources in the context of climate change
Water is key to food security and nutrition. Water of sufficient quantity and quality is critical
for agricultural production, and for the preparation and processing of food.
Along with sanitation and good hygiene practices, access to safe drinking water is also crucial to good nutrition. Poor-quality water can cause a number of waterborne diseases, transmitted by ingestion of contaminated water, and can lead to malnutrition, morbidity and sometimes death. Important waterborne diseases include diarrheal diseases, cholera, shigella, typhoid, hepatitis A and E, and poliomyelitis. According to the WHO, diarrheal diseases alone account for an estimated 3.6 percent of the global burden of disease and are responsible for 1.5 million deaths per year. An estimated
58 percent of such deaths – 842 000 deaths per year, including 361 000 children under the age of five – are attributable to unsafe water supply, inadequate sanitation.
The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has also highlighted the importance of safe water, beyond waterborne diseases, as one of the simple precautionary measures – frequent handwashing – helps prevent transmission but is unlikely to be followed or effective without a safe water source. According to a 2019 report by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and WHO, in 2017, 1.6 billion people had handwashing facilities without water or soap at the time of the survey, and 1.4 billion people had no handwashing facility at all. In most countries with disaggregated data, access to handwashing was more limited in rural than urban areas.
SDG Target 6.1 states: “By 2030, achieve universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all.” According to the 2019 report by UNICEF and WHO, one in three people globally do not have access to safe drinking water, and more than half of the world’s population do not have access to safe sanitation services. Access to drinking water can be described as water available on the premises or within a certain travel time.
In 2017, 90 percent of the world’s population had access to at least basic drinking water services – i.e., collection from an improved source, if available, of less than 30 minutes for a round trip – compared with 82 percent in 2000. Lack of access to drinking water can be a problem in urban and rural areas, but almost always affects a larger share of the rural population. Eight out of ten people lacking basic services live in rural areas, almost half of them in least developed countries. In those areas, 19 percent are without basic access compared with 3 percent in urban areas. In 17 countries (most of them in sub-Saharan Africa), more than half the rural population do not have access to drinking water (see Figure A). Not having access to safe drinking water on the premises at home entails – especially in rural areas – considerable time to access it, and it is often women’s time. According to a recent United Nations report, this is true for all world regions with data available except Eastern and Southern Europe, and Latin America and the Caribbean, where the role of water collection is almost equally distributed between the sexes.
The objective should be for everyone to have access to safe water in their home. A more ambitious measure is safely managed water, meaning rural households accessing water on the premises, available when needed and free from contamination. For water to be considered safely managed, all three criteria must be met. This is the measure embodied in SDG Indicator 6.1.1, which assesses the proportion of population,
71 percent, using safely managed drinking water. In urban areas, 85 percent of the global population use safely managed water; in rural areas, the figure is only 53 percent, with numbers much lower in least developed countries, landlocked developing countries and SIDS (see Figure B).
Among the regions, sub-Saharan Africa has the lowest level of access to safely managed water, with only 12 percent of its rural population having access to safely managed drinking water. Given that a further 34 percent have only basic access (requiring a round trip of less than
30 minutes), for more than half of rural people in the region the options are either water collection that takes longer than 30 minutes or from unimproved sources or surface water. Accessing safe drinking water is a challenge for more than 300 million people in rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa. This has implications in terms of health risks and time spent fetching water. A case study reported that in households in Cameroon, Chad and Senegal without drinking water, children are considerably more likely to have diarrhea than those in households with access to water. The link between prevalence of diarrhea among children and malnutrition is well established, highlighting that water quality is important for food utilization and nutrition, even where food is available.
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