An article by Gérard Payen, Vice-President of the French Water Partnership (FWP) and former water adviser to the UN Secretary-General.
In 2015, the unanimous adoption of the Agenda 2030 and its Global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) finally provided humanity with a number of ambitious projects for drinking water and sanitation. As far as drinking water is concerned, we are aiming for universal access to uncontaminated water that is easily accessible and available every day at an affordable cost, in order to make this human right a reality. For sanitation, we also have a goal of universal access: to ensure that everyone has decent toilets that pose no health risk, with proper disposal of human waste, another right. But we also want to protect ourselves: to protect our neighbours, others and the environment, from all forms of water pollution caused by human activities.
Our ambition is to reduce by 50% the amount of wastewater discharged into the environment without treatment. These global objectives are described in detail in SDG targets 6.1, 6.2 and 6.3, with particular attention paid to poor people in target 1.4 and slum dwellers in target 11.1. They are ambitious, but unfortunately they correspond to very real and significant needs.
Significant progress in access…
The adoption of the global MDG programme has greatly improved our knowledge of needs. A huge effort has been made by statisticians at the UN and in all countries to design relevant indicators to monitor progress towards the global goals. Although still limited, the new statistical knowledge represents major progress. For objectives whose evolution over time has already been estimated, the players can no longer be satisfied with fine speeches about what they are doing and the resulting progress. They are now faced with the reality of needs.
When it comes to people’s access to drinking water and sanitation in their homes, we now have solid estimates of current needs and trends since 2015 at global level, by major region, and for many countries. On average, progress is clear: between 2015 and 2022, almost 700 million people will have gained satisfactory access to uncontaminated water.
As for access to basic sanitation, i.e. hygienic, dignified and non-collective toilets, the gains are even greater: 1 billion since 2015. These advances should be compared with needs, which are steadily increasing as a result of demographic, urban and economic growth, as well as rising living standards. The 550 million increase in the world’s population over the same period reduces the scale of progress towards universal access, i.e. the reduction in needs (see graph below).
… but targets far from met
Progress on drinking water is very slow, far too slow, with 2.2 billion people still using water that is probably contaminated, three times as many as without electricity. If this rate of progress were to continue, hundreds of millions of people would be without drinking water in the next century, even though universal access was planned for 2030. Over the period 2015-2022, the reduction in access needs was four times slower for drinking water than for basic sanitation, while access to electricity improved five times faster. In other words, policies for access to drinking water are far less effective than policies for access to sanitation and electricity.
If we take a closer look at the trends, we can see that prolonging current trends for drinking water would in no way solve the needs. In fact, needs are increasing rather than decreasing in two very large populations: the urbanised half of the planet and sub-Saharan Africa (see figure below).
These setbacks [1] make it mathematically impossible to achieve the global goal of universal access to drinking water. The number of people lacking basic sanitation is also rising in sub-Saharan Africa. On the other hand, sanitation is slowly improving in the urban half of the world.
Insufficient results in education and health.
The WHO and UNICEF have recently produced global statistics showing the extent of the shortage of drinking water and toilets in schools and, even worse, in healthcare establishments, despite the fact that non-contamination of water and by water is a major factor in health. On average, only three quarters of schools worldwide (and almost half of those in the poorest quarter of the world) have permanent access to clear water (although it is not guaranteed to be potable) for drinking, washing hands or cleaning; 8% have water facilities, but the water does not flow every day, and 15% have only water that is potentially contaminated by animals.
The situation is similar for toilets: only 78% of schools have proper, separate toilets for girls and boys, 11% have only single-sex toilets and 11% have no hygienic closed toilets. Inadequate sanitation is therefore an obstacle to the schooling of almost one girl in four. Fortunately, the situation seems to be improving: in eight years, the need for drinking water or sanitation has been reduced by around 28%.
The problems are similar for health establishments: in 2022, only 84% of hospitals and 80% of smaller health establishments had permanent access to clear water (of unknown potability) for drinking, treatment and cleaning. In 2021, 850 million patients went to a healthcare facility without water, and the same number to facilities whose water was potentially contaminated by animals. The total number of these patients without sufficient water is increasing by around 1% per year.
As for toilets, there is not enough data to give a global picture. But we do know that only 30% of facilities in Latin America and 22% of facilities in sub-Saharan Africa have functional, hygienic toilets that are separated by sex.
Too little attention paid to cleaning up water after use
Until very recently, there was no global data on pollution discharges. In 2015, the objective of halving the flow of wastewater discharged without treatment was adopted, and after several years this has finally made it possible to establish statistical data. It is estimated that the global proportion of domestic wastewater discharged into the environment without proper treatment will be 42% in 2022.
But in the absence of a comparable estimate for an earlier date, we will have to wait another two or three years to find out whether the global total is increasing or decreasing. We do know, however, that the very high number of people without ‘safely managed’ sanitation, i.e. without minimal decontamination or non-contaminating storage, is slowly falling (-9% in seven years).
As for pollution discharged by industry, the data from individual countries is still too incomplete to permit a global estimate. We therefore do not know whether the world is progressing or falling behind on its SDG 6.3 target for reducing pollution discharges. It should also be noted that the indicators chosen for SDG targets 6.6 and 14.1 are insufficient to measure the impact of discharges on water and marine ecosystems.
Doing more and doing it faster
The world has finally set ambitious targets for access to drinking water, access to sanitation and controlling pollution from wastewater. This has greatly improved our global knowledge of these issues. But this new information does not show any change in the pace of achievement after 2015. Worse still, it shows setbacks for several parts of the world’s population. If current trends were to continue unchanged, there would still be billions of people, over several generations, without access to drinking water or sanitation. When it comes to controlling pollution, it is also clear that the objective has no chance of being achieved.
Today, most of the various players are doing what they can with their respective resources and constraints. Many very positive projects are being launched, by public authorities, financial institutions, economic players, NGOs and local communities. But taken as a whole, these many initiatives are not enough. If the huge gaps between objectives and reality are narrowing only slowly, or even increasing, it is not because of inaction, but because the rate of progress is lower than the rate of growth in needs. The collective global challenge is clear: we need to do more, faster. We need to move from a world where the many stakeholders in the water sector are satisfied with a job well done, to a world where the scale of the drinking water and sanitation challenges is effectively addressed [2].
A political leap forward is needed. For the past four years, UN-Water has been alerting all governments to the need to speed up public water and sanitation policies, but so far without any convincing effect. This is no easy task, as it calls into question many habits and political balances. Even France has some progress to make. This century, governments have only met once at the UN to discuss all their water problems. That was in March 2023. They recognised a global crisis but failed to commit to any action. They will meet again in December 2026, this time to discuss the implementation of their objectives, those mentioned above. New statistical knowledge will objectify the situation and render meaningless the declarations of good intentions that ignore them. Will governments finally decide to adapt their actions to their common objectives?
[1] ‘Eau potable : que nous apprennent les statistiques mondiales au-delà des rapports officiels ?’, Gérard Payen, Défis humanitaires #86 (February 2024).
[2] ‘Le défi mondial de l’eau potable et de l’assainissement : faire davantage et plus vite’, Gérard Payen, AFD Proparco, ‘Secteur privé & développement’ #42, November 2024.
TO GO FURTHER
– The numerical data on the various accesses are extracted or calculated by the author from reports and the database available on the WHO-Unicef website http://www.washdata.org.
– For wastewater, the reference report is Progress on Wastewater Treatment – 2024 Update, WHO-Habitat, UN-Water.
– Gérard Payen, ‘Accès à l’eau potable : le changement majeur d’objectif mondial en 2015 se heurt à des habitudes technocratiques tenaces’, in Défis Humanitaires, March 2023.
We would like to thank the Revue des ponts, des eaux et des forêts and the graduates of the Ecole nationale des Ponts et Chaussées for permission to republish in Défis Humanitaires this article by Gérard Payen, which appeared in PCM 919 in December 2024.
Water, a common good – Understanding planetary cycles
Gérard Payen.
Gérard Payen has been working for over 35 years to solve water-related problems in all countries. As Water Adviser to the Secretary General of the United Nations (member of UNSGAB) from 2004 to 2015, he contributed to the recognition of the Human Rights to safe drinking water and sanitation, as well as to the adoption of the numerous water-related targets of the global Sustainable Development Goals. Today, he continues to work to mobilise the international community for better management of water-related problems, which requires more ambitious public policies. Vice-president of the French Water Partnership, he also advises the United Nations agencies that produce global water statistics. Impressed by the number of misconceptions about the nature of water-related problems, ideas that hamper public authorities in their decision-making, he published a book in 2013 to dismantle these preconceptions.
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