The News
More than 4.4 billion people in low and middle income countries lack access to safely managed drinking water, twice as many as the United Nations and World Health Organizations had previously estimated, according to new research.
The scientists used household survey data, satellite observations, and geospatial modeling to make detailed maps that traced drinking water supply across 135 lower and middle income countries.
The biggest hurdle to access to safely managed drinking water was fecal contamination, affecting nearly half the population of these regions.
The difference in the WHO and UN’s estimates and the new estimate has to do, on some level, with the data, Esther Greenwood, the study’s lead author, told Semafor. Her team looked at the household level, in contrast to the UN and WHO, which seemingly made their calculations at the population level, she said.
SIGNALS
Better data on global access to safe water is needed
Household surveys on water use are typically gathered once every 5-10 years, due in part to the vast effort and expense required, so it’s not possible to definitively say how many people have access to safely managed drinking water in 2024, Greenwood said. Such studies “only capture water use at the moment of the survey, [and] climate, seasonality, and other factors may influence people’s water use,” she added. Machine learning can help fill in some of the gaps, particularly in areas where there is little or no available household data, but “in the end, every model is only as good as the data which is available and which it is fed, so if we want to improve our estimates, we need better data,” she said.
Water as a human right
The UN recognized access to clean drinking water as a human right in 2010. Intertwined with other rights, such as to life and health, its realization nevertheless highlights the complexity of the international consensus that rights are “indivisible, interdependent, and interrelated,” a water security expert argued in the Center for Strategic and International Studies. It requires governments and institutions to navigate competing claims on resources, and lack of access is often not down to a lack of availability, he wrote. Framing water as a human rights issue raises questions as to whether it can also be a commodity: The UN argues that water would be better treated as a “common good,” and at least affordable, if not free, a former UN expert told The Economist.
Climate change exacerbates water issues
Climate experts have long argued that the climate crisis is “essentially a water crisis,” and that climate change is “primarily experienced in terms of too much, or too little, water.” Climate change is intensifying water cycles in a “wet-gets-wetter-dry-gets-drier” pattern, which severely limits access to fresh water supplies in ways that threaten the long-term viability of cities unless fixes like desalination are put in place, the researchers who study the changing water cycle wrote in The Conversation. Indeed, water stress — when demand for safe, usable water outstrips supply — particularly affects the Middle East and North Africa, and wealthy countries already have to rely on expensive, energy-intensive desalination processes, the Council on Foreign Relations noted.