4 results
10 - Water and Sanitation
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- By Frank Rijsberman, CGIAR Consortium, Alix Peterson Zwane, Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene Program, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
- Edited by Bjørn Lomborg
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- Book:
- Global Problems, Smart Solutions
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 14 November 2013, pp 597-631
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Summary
The challenge
The world has met the MDG on water five years early, according to the most recent Joint Monitoring Program update, released in March 2012, but will miss its goal on basic sanitation by almost 1 billion people (WHO/UNICEF, 2012). An astonishing one-third of the world population, 2.5 billion people, does not have access to basic sanitation and over 1 billion people defecate out in the open. In light of the evidence that the world community is making progress in the water sector, and because sanitation is typically the neglected half of the water and sanitation challenge, including in the 2008 Copenhagen Consensus Challenge Paper on water and sanitation (Whittington et al., 2008) this chapter redresses that imbalance and focuses primarily on sanitation and the question of whether and how it would be cost-effective to dramatically change levels of investment to solve this problem.
The benefits of sanitation as a public health solution seem self-evident. Quotations like this from a Lancet editorial are easy to find:
It is already well known that improved sanitation could prevent 1·5 million deaths from diarrheal illnesses a year, enhances dignity, privacy, and safety, especially for women and girls, benefits the economy – every dollar spent on sanitation generates economic benefits worth around nine more – and is better for the environment. (Lancet, 2008)
In the United States, large public sector investments to provide clean water and sewerage were jointly responsible for most of the rapid decline in the child mortality rate in the early twentieth century (Cutler and Miller, 2005), and more recently for substantial health improvements on Native American Indian reservations (Watson, 2006).
7 - Water and sanitation
- Edited by Bjørn Lomborg, Copenhagen Business School
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- Book:
- Global Crises, Global Solutions
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 09 July 2009, pp 355-450
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Summary
Introduction
The 1980s were designated the International Water and Sanitation Decade, and the international community committed itself to ensuring that everyone in the world would have access to at least basic water and sanitation services by 1990. This target was not met. While hundreds of millions did receive access to new services, at the end of the decade well over 1.1 billion people still lacked improved water supplies, and more than 2.7 billion lacked sanitation services. By the year 2000, although another billion people had obtained access to improved water and sanitation services, population growth had left the number of those still unserved at roughly the same absolute level. In 2002, at the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development, the global community made a new commitment to a set of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), including environmental sustainability. One of the targets under the environmental sustainability MDG is to cut by half the proportion of people in the world living without access to water and sanitation by 2015.
While we certainly hope that the global target for water and sanitation will be met this time, there are grounds for concern. Some important physical and economic features of water supply and sanitation make it inherently difficult to achieve broad-scale goals such as those of the International Water and Sanitation Decade and the MDG water and sanitation target – more difficult than for other MDG targets such as providing access to affordable essential drugs or communication and information technology.
8 - The Water Challenge
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- By Frank Rijsberman, Director General International Water Management Institute, Colombo, Sri Lanka; Professor UNESCO-IHE, International Institute for Water Education, Delft, and Wageningen University and Research, Wageningen
- Edited by Bjørn Lomborg
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- Book:
- How to Spend $50 Billion to Make the World a Better Place
- Published online:
- 27 July 2009
- Print publication:
- 12 June 2006, pp 129-140
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Summary
Characteristics of the water challenge
Despite the massive investment in water resource development during the twentieth century – in recent decades also reaching the developing world – there is still what many see as a “water crisis.” This has two key facets:
Lack of access to safe and affordable domestic water supply (for over a billion people) and sanitation (for nearly half the world's population).
Lack of access to water for productive purposes for the rural poor.
There is clearly sufficient water available in the world for all mankind's needs: domestic, industrial, and agricultural, although it is distributed very unevenly. The problem is not lack of water, but that the unserved do not have access to capital (financial or political) to make it available to them. The challenge addressed here is, therefore, providing access for poor people to safe water for domestic and productive purposes.
Domestic water needs are relatively small; only 20–50 litres per head each day in developing countries (although up to ten times this in the USA and Europe). In contrast, each person needs thousands of litres a day to produce their food. About 1,000 litres (one cubic metre) of water are needed to produce one kilogram of cereal grain, and meat production requires considerably higher quantities. On average, each person needs seventy times as much water to feed them as for all domestic purposes.
Water resources are subject to competition for different uses, particularly agriculture and the environment.
9 - Sanitation and access to clean water
- Edited by Bjørn Lomborg, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark
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- Book:
- Global Crises, Global Solutions
- Published online:
- 22 September 2009
- Print publication:
- 25 October 2004, pp 498-540
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Summary
Characteristics of the Water Challenge
There has been much talk about a ‘world water crisis’ among water experts for several decades now and among policymakers and the public at large for the last five to ten years. What is this crisis? Is the world running out of water? Has there not been enough investment to make water available to people? In the twentieth century there has been massive investment in water resources development. The world population tripled in the last century, but water use grew sixfold. The governments of the United States and Australia, for example, constructed some 5,000 m3 of water storage infrastructure for each and every one of their citizens. Most of this infrastructure is meant to produce hydroelectricity and to irrigate farm land, while some is meant to control floods and store water for domestic water supply for urban areas. Even more money has been invested in water distribution infrastructure, treatment plants, sewerage and wastewater treatment. Water resources development has been a major part of the investments in developing countries – a key component of bilateral aid, World Bank lending, and domestic investment – and the subject of a water supply and sanitation investment drive called ‘the water decade’ in the 1980s. With all this investment, why is there still a crisis?
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