GNV News – August 18, 2024

A study published in the journal Science on August 15, 2024 reported that about 4.4 billion people—more than half of the world’s population—lack access to safe household drinking water. This is more than double the 2 billion that the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimated in 2020, highlighting that the problem had been underestimated.

Until now, UNICEF has relied on household surveys to determine how many people have access to safe water. However, this approach depended on incomplete data: collection is extremely infrequent, water-quality data are lacking, and the use of drinking water from public facilities is not addressed. Using a new approach with geospatial data in the present study, the researchers found that in low- and middle-income countries only one in three people have access to safely managed drinking-water services, and that fecal contamination is a major limiting factor affecting nearly half the population. It was also pointed out that progress in collecting information on safe drinking water is slow, and that there is a large data gap between estimates from previous studies and the actual current status of access to safe drinking water.

Learn more about the links between global water scarcity and conflict → “Global water conflicts: the unreported facts”

Learn more about Central Asia and water-resource issues → “Water crisis in Central Asia: Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan”

(Photo: Gerhard Holub / Wikimedia Commons [CC BY-SA 4.0])