2 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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- Chapter
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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.