Science and Health

UN: Polluted water killing, sickening millions

(Agencies)
Updated: 2010-03-23 09:58

UNITED NATIONS - Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon challenged world leaders Monday to ensure that all people have access to safe drinking water, saying more people die from unsafe water than from all forms of violence, including war.

"Clean water has become scarce and will become even scarcer with the onset of climate change," the UN chief warned in a message coinciding with World Water Day.

Every day, millions of tons of untreated sewage and industrial and agricultural waste are poured into the world's water systems, and it is the poor who "continue to suffer first and most from pollution, water shortages and the lack of adequate sanitation," Ban said.

According to a report issued Monday by the UN Environment Program, the estimated 2 billion tons of waste water discharged daily fuel the spread of disease and damage ecosystems.

At least 1.8 million children under the age of five die every year from water-related diseases, or one every 20 seconds, the report said, and over half the world's hospital beds are occupied with people suffering from illnesses linked to contaminated water.

Achim Steiner, executive director of the Nairobi-based UN agency, warned that if waste can't be managed properly, "that means more people dying from waterborne diseases."

The secretary-general called the deaths "an affront to our common humanity."

World leaders have the "know-how to solve these challenges and become better stewards of our water resources," Ban said, and he challenged them to act ahead of a high-level General Assembly meeting in September to assess progress toward meeting the UN Millennium Development Goals to reduce global poverty by the target date of 2015.

One of those goals calls for reducing the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation by half.

According to the latest report of the Joint Monitoring Program for Water and Sanitation, the world is on track to meet the drinking water target.

Prince Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, chair of the secretary-general's Advisory Board on Water and Sanitation, speaking via video-link to Nairobi's Water Day events, said 810 million people, including 120 million in sub-Saharan Africa, had gained access to drinking water since 2000 "but we cannot lean back."

It isn't certain that this water is safe to drink, he explained, because an alarming quantity of water carried unsafe levels of microbes and chemicals, making people sick.

At a high-level General Assembly water event Monday, former assembly president Jan Eliasson, who chairs WaterAid Sweden, added that despite the progress, some 885 million people still did not have access to clean water and there were still great regional disparities.

Deputy Secretary-General Asha-Rose Migiro said the number of people in rural areas without clean water is over five times the number in urban areas _ and 37 percent of people without access to clean water are in sub-Saharan Africa.

Migiro said the sanitation picture was worse.

Although 1.3 billion people have gained access to improved sanitation since 1990, the world is likely to miss the UN target by a billion people, she said.

"Access to clean water and adequate sanitation are a prerequisite for lifting people out of poverty," she said.

Eliasson said it was time to end "turf battles" and bring together governments, the private sector, universities and others to tackle the problem.

He called for a higher percentage of development aid to be given to improving water and sanitation.

"If the world is to thrive, let alone to survive on a planet of 6 billion people heading to over 9 billion by 2050," UNEP's Steiner said, "we need to get collectively smarter and more intelligent about how we manage waste, including waste water."