Water: A Matter of Survival in the World of Pandemics

The COVID-19 pandemic has undeniably amplified the existing vulnerabilities of billions of people worldwide. Marginalised communities in developing countries were excluded from social protection and support.

Long-standing economic and social inequalities have deepened with the poor getting poorer. A sharp divide in the distribution of vaccines has revealed major issues in the global health sector.

Economic stimulus packages amounting to about US$10 trillion were assembled in a matter of months — a much larger sum than what governments invested when the 2008 financial crisis struck. Yet, progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has largely decelerated.

In fact, the pandemic has made many of the SDGs literally unachievable in the time left until 2030.

Progress towards SDG 6 — Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all — is among the goals most suffering. The world at large was already off track on this before the pandemic.

An estimated 2 billion and 3.6 billion people still live without access to safely managed water supplies and sanitation respectively. Funds needed to tackle this immense challenge were estimated in 2016 to be US$74–166 billion annually until 2030.

They have never been raised and now, likely, more is needed. Instead, due to the pandemic, water funding is now projected to decrease.

The cost of meeting other SDG 6 targets — beyond just universal water supply and sanitation — is not included in the above figure. With attention turning now to post-pandemic economic recovery plans, the question is: where and how do we get the money needed to achieve SDG 6 in the final nine years of the SDG era if we continuously failed to do so in the first six years?

Recently initiated acceleration frameworks create some hope, and yet it is difficult to be particularly optimistic.

As we face unresolved global water challenges, the COVID-19 pandemic, while detrimental in itself already, might be a prelude to more threatening events. The world needs to get used to and prepare for “living with pandemics”, as the risk of infectious diseases now competes side by side with the risk of our failure to act on climate change.

New infectious diseases may increase in the next decades, not least due to continuing uncontrolled human destruction of ecosystems. The next pandemics could bring even higher mortality rates or as yet unimaginable human health impacts.

In this context, providing safe water and sanitation, and ensuring healthy freshwater ecosystems are no longer matters of just basic needs, human rights, or dignity. They are matters of survival for all. Strategic actions are required now rather than waiting for the next pandemic episodes.

Countries will likely have little choice other than addressing multiple development challenges simultaneously. Yet, from the standpoint of preparing for future pandemics, further prioritisation of those challenges needs to be made.

In the global water sector, there are several items that may need to receive priority in the next nine SDG years:

• Ensure universal water and sanitation access in healthcare facilities. In sub-Saharan Africa alone, roughly half of healthcare facilities lack access to basic water, and three quarters lack access to sanitation services, while data on access to basic hygiene services in these facilities is widely unavailable across all regions.
• Ensure water and sanitation access in schools. Globally, 31% and 37% of schools lack access to basic water and sanitation services respectively. Girls who lack access to safe water and sanitation at school are more likely to abandon their education, creating long-term impacts, with losses in their lifetime productivity and earnings estimated at US$15–30 trillion.
• Provide water access to refugees, who numbered more than 26 million in 2020. COVID-19 has worsened refugees’ living conditions and untreated water and inadequate sanitation and hygiene has increased the possibility of infectious diseases — now and in the future.
• Improve water and health services for the urban poor. One in four of the world urban population live in informal settlements where social distancing, regular hand washing and other pandemic management practices are unfeasible. Short-term responses, including the suspension of water billing, and water trucks and water supply points, have been far from enough to offset the access gap in these areas.

The above challenges have a lot in common. All are explicitly human-centric and target the most vulnerable; hence they are critical to address if we are serious about leaving no one behind. All of them, if addressed, will alleviate the impact of future pandemics.

All contribute to SDG 6 targets on universal water supply and sanitation. All have strong links with other important SDGs — e.g. you cannot eradicate a source of refugees without ensuring peace, political stability and arresting environmental degradation.

And all are implicit within the current SDG targets. Achieving the above milestones may not be enough for universal access to water and sanitation, but they will still be unprecedented achievements in modern history.

Arresting the degradation of freshwater ecosystems — to reduce the probability of future pandemics — also needs to be made much stronger. Although some relevant processes are on the way, they may turn out to be too lengthy to be effective.

Overall, the COVID-19 pandemic suggests that revisiting and articulating priorities in the ongoing SDG efforts may be in order. With almost 170 targets, the SDG framework, while comprehensive, is perhaps too ambitious for a rather short period.

And it is not just a matter of periodic assessment of the SDG progress, but also a matter of adjusting the targets; particularly when many original targets were blurred and when new major factors like pandemics recently reshaped the world. There are things that just can no longer wait. Fixing at least some of the world’s most chronic water problems is one of them.

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This article was first published by Inter Press Service News.