SDG6 - Clean Water and Sanitation

Balancing the Water Cycle for Sustainable Life on Earth

Eva Kremere, Edward Morgan, Pedi Obani

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781789731064
• eBook ISBN: 9781789731057
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Providing safe and clean water for all without damaging the environment is one of the biggest challenges of the SDGs. SDG6 is an ambitious goal which seeks to establish the framework through which environmentally responsible water resource management, sanitation and security can be achieved. 

Bridging academic discussion and real-world case studies, this book considers the challenge of balancing the provision of the basic human right of access to water whilst not eroding our capacity to live sustainably in a rapidly changing world. It considers the impact of climate change on the water cycle and discusses how this will increase the vulnerability of communities, including those in regions that already experience acute water challenges. The book also highlights the need for more urgent action on increasing the resilience and quality of freshwater ecosystems and how this links to sanitation practices. The book concludes with a discussion of some of the key challenges and possible solutions to meeting SDG6. 

Concise Guides to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals comprises 17 short books, each examining one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The series provides an integrated assessment of the SDGs from economic, legal, social, environmental and cultural perspectives.

1

INTRODUCTION

SDG 6 is concerned with water and water management. It has the following target:

Ensuring universal access to safe and affordable drinking water for all by 2030 requires we invest in adequate infrastructure, provide sanitation facilities, and encourage hygiene at every level. Protecting and restoring water-related ecosystems such as forests, mountains, wetlands and rivers is essential if we are to mitigate water scarcity. More international cooperation is also needed to encourage water efficiency and support treatment technologies in developing countries.

This is to be achieved through the following goals:

6.1. By 2030, achieve universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all.

6.2. By 2030, achieve access to adequate and equitable sanitation and hygiene for all and end open defecation, paying special attention to the needs of women and girls and those in vulnerable situations.

6.3. By 2030, improve water quality by reducing pollution, eliminating dumping and minimising release of hazardous chemicals and materials, halving the proportion of untreated wastewater and substantially increasing recycling and safe reuse globally.

6.4. By 2030, substantially increase water use efficiency across all sectors and ensure sustainable withdrawals and supply of freshwater to address water scarcity and substantially reduce the number of people suffering from water scarcity.

6.5. By 2030, implement integrated water resources management at all levels, including through transboundary cooperation as appropriate.

6.6. By 2020, protect and restore water-related ecosystems, including mountains, forests, wetlands, rivers, aquifers and lakes.

6.a. By 2030, expand international cooperation and capacity-building support to developing countries in water- and sanitation-related activities and programmes, including water harvesting, desalination, water efficiency, wastewater treatment, recycling and reuse technologies.

6.b. Support and strengthen the participation of local communities in improving water and sanitation management.

There is no doubt that the target and goals of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are ambitious, but they do, to some extent, build on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the relative success seen with them. The MDGs focussed strongly on sanitation and clean drinking water, which was in response to the serious health and economic development challenges resulting from a lack of clean water. The MDGs included the target to ‘halve, by 2015, … the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation’ (United Nations General Assembly, 2000).¹

These goals were ambitious but there has been significant success in achieving them (United Nations, 2011). The MDG website (United Nations, 2015c) notes that:

• The world has met the target of halving the proportion of people without access to improved sources of water, five years ahead of schedule.
• Between 1990 and 2015, 2.6 billion people gained access to improved drinking water sources.
• Worldwide 2.1 billion people have gained access to improved sanitation. Despite progress, 2.4 billion are still using unimproved sanitation facilities, including 946 million people who are still practising open defecation.

As targets on these issues have been increasingly met, the SDGs recognised the need for expanding the water goals. Achieving universal access to clean safe water was the obvious next step and builds directly on the work of achieving the MDGs. A new aspect and crucial difference with the SDGs is the inclusion of pollution control, integrated water resources management (IWRM) and a greater focus on ecosystems. This inclusion is welcome, but substantially adds to the complexity of the SDG water challenge and creates potential new conflicts in trying to achieve the goals, as this chapter will discuss.

At the same time, it is crucial to consider the relevance of water and SDG6 to other SDGs. The nature of water is such that it will have relevance to every SDG (see Table 1.1) to a greater or lesser extent. There are strong links to SDGs 1 and 8 (water is key to poverty reduction and future development), 2 (water is vital to food supply), 3 (water is key to health), 11 (sustainable and liveable cities need water supplies), and 14 and 15 (terrestrial and aquatic life depends on water and the water cycle). There are also (perhaps less obvious links) to: SDGs 5 gender equality (water can often be a gendered issue in communities, for example, women having to walk long distances to provide water), 7 affordable and clean energy (water will be crucial in energy supplies, especially hydropower and coal/gas), 9 (infrastructure will require water, and achieving clean water and sanitation will need innovation and infrastructure), 10 (equity of water access and availability is a key goal of IWRM), and 16 (conflicts over water are common and growing). Climate action (13) is also likely to influence water use, and responsible production and consumption (12) will have to include water use considerations. Finally, there is a link to education (4), as access to water can help boost education attendance and involvement, but perhaps more crucially education is vital to water management and inclusion of understanding water within quality education will help support SDG6. Hence, achieving SDG6 can support many of the other SDGs, but there are also a number of potential conflicts and trade-offs that will have to be considered and negotiated.

This book examines some of the key aspects of SDG6 and their implications on an international scale. It then presents three case studies that look at different elements of SDG6, namely water sanitation and health, ecosystem protection and restoration, and integrated water resource management. These case studies highlight the challenges achieving SDG6 faces in particular contexts, providing examples of the potential synergies and conflicts that achieving the goals provides.

Table 1.1.     The Links Between SDG6 and the Other SDGs.

The book seeks to present the goals, the challenges they face and the implications for the water sector and beyond if we are to meet them.

NOTE

1. In addition, in 2003, sustainable access to water was identified as a human right by the United Nations (UN Committee on Economic Social and Cultural Rights, 2003).

2

GOALS 6.1 AND 6.2: WATER, SANITATION AND HEALTH

2.1. INTRODUCTION

WASH issues have been prominent in the International Development Agenda since the 1980s. WASH was initially understood to include water, sanitation, and health, and was used by development agencies to frame the linkages between access to water and sanitation, on the one hand, and health outcomes on the other. However, by the early 2000s, WASH acquired its current usage as an acronym for water, sanitation and hygiene (de Jong, 2003; Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council & World Health Organization, 2005). The term ‘water’ generally connotes water supply for personal and domestic uses, while ‘sanitation’ refers to services or facilities for the disposal of human waste and ‘hygiene’ is mainly couched in terms of water and soap for handwashing. In some cases, other acronyms like WatSan (water and sanitation) and WES (water and environmental sanitation) have been used to connote water supply and sanitation services for personal and domestic uses, with growing scholarship on the critical importance of hygiene for the realisation of safe water and sanitation services (Kvarnström, McConville, Bracken, Johansson, & Fodge, 2011; Obani & Gupta, 2016a). Perhaps as a testament to the initial understanding of WASH, the literature and key actors mainly approach WASH issues from the perspective of public health risks and outcomes (Joshi, Fawcett, & Mannan, 2011; Montgomery, Jones, Kabole, Johnston, & Gordon, 2018).

Previously, under the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) framework, there was a water and sanitation target framed under Goal 7, which aimed to ensure environmental sustainability. The relevant MDG 7 target was to ‘[H]alve, by 2015, the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation’. Remarkably, the target for safe drinking water was met five years before the end of the MDG, in 2010, but most countries were off track to meeting the sanitation target by 2015. However, the literature suggests that the indicator, access to improved facilities, may have obscured water quality issues and painted a false picture of the real progress achieved even with the water target. Furthermore, accounting for the number of improved sanitation facilities with sewerage connection reduced the estimated population using improved sanitation by at least 12%, from 2.8 billion to 4.3 billion people in 2010 (Baum, Luh, & Bartram, 2013). The MDG WASH target, through its focus on averages, effectively obscured inequities in access and inherent tensions between WASH and other development goals, like slum development that led to forced evictions in some cases. The MDG framework also lacked targets for other issues that are important for ensuring environmental sustainability and access to water and sanitation and hygiene, including water quality, wastewater treatment and reuse, sustainable water withdrawals, water-use efficiency, integrated water resources management (IWRM), and the protection of water-related ecosystems; these are covered under the SDG 6 targets.

WASH now forms part of the technical targets for the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 which aims to ‘ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all’. The relevant SDG targets aim by 2030, to achieve universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all, on the one hand, and ‘access to adequate and equitable sanitation and hygiene for all and end open defecation, paying special attention to the needs of women and girls and those in vulnerable situations’ on the other. Firstly, the SDG focusses on universal access rather than a proportionate increase in access by half. Secondly, the SDG targets specify further criteria through which the quality of drinking water services (safely managed) and sanitation services, including handwashing (adequate and equitable), while prioritising groups like women and girls with special needs and other persons in vulnerable situations.

Although the SDG WASH targets appear to look beyond a public health focus to integrate broader issues of equity, affordability and the special needs and vulnerability of the users, this is not yet reflected in the relevant SDG indicators. It is the World Health Organization/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) which monitored the implementation of the water and sanitation targets under the MDG framework that is also responsible for measuring the water, sanitation and hygiene indicators under the SDG. In measuring the number of persons who use a ‘safely managed’ drinking water service, the focus is on the use of an improved water source located on-premises, accessible as required and free from contamination, while a ‘safely managed’ sanitation service is a basic facility (improved facility, not shared) that safely disposes of human waste, and hygiene coverage refers to the accessibility of a handwashing facility with soap and water within the premises (United Nations, 2018).

Generally, there is a risk that the implementation of the SDGs prioritises social inclusion at the expense of ecological and relational inclusion which ultimately compromises the achievement of sustainable development (Gupta & Vegelin, 2016). This chapter analyses the prominence of WASH in SDG 6 and in relation to the other SDGs, in light of the imperative of achieving sustainable development. The main question for the chapter is, therefore: What is the importance of WASH to SDG6 and how is this reflected in the current framing of the SDGs? In addressing this question, it is necessary to explore the overlaps and potential tensions, with tools for resolving them where they occur, in the interactions between the separate WASH targets on the one hand, and other SDGs targets on the other. Such an analysis is important because though the overall SDGs framework mainstreams sustainable development, there could be trade-offs both between and within the goals, in the process of implementation. The analysis shows that WASH is of critical importance to realising both SDG 6 and other SDGs, especially no poverty (SDG 1), zero hunger (SDG 2), good health and well-being (SDG 3), decent work and economic growth (SDG 8), reduced inequalities (SDG 10) and life on land (SDG 15), however there is minim...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Goals 6.1 and 6.2: Water, Sanitation and Health
• 3. Goals 6.3, 6.4 and 6.5: Water Quality, Water Efficiency and Integrated Water ResourceManagement
• 4. SDG 6.6: Protecting and Restoring Water-Related Ecosystems
• 5. SDG6A and 6B: Governance, Cooperation and Participation
• 6. Case Study: Restoration of Water Ecosystem at the Melnais Lake Raised Bog in Latvia
• 7. Case Study: Water Management and Addressing Water Scarcity in Australia – Achieving SDG6?
• 8. Case Study: Nigeria and SDG6
• 9. Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index