Water scarcity, lack of drinking water, increasing droughts and floods… Billions of people are already affected by water problems, with an “imminent” risk of a global crisis.
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Here are the key figures compiled by the UN Water Platform, which is releasing its report to mark the opening of a conference on water in New York on Wednesday.
bottlenecks
Global water use has increased by about 1% per year over the past 40 years.
To quench this thirst, people resort to groundwater, sometimes over-extracting it: between 100 and 200 km3 of underground water reserves are depleted every year.
About 10% of the world’s population lives in a country where water stress (the relationship between water use and water availability) reaches high or critical levels, “significantly” reducing the availability of water for people’s needs.
And according to the UN climate change experts (IPCC) report released on Monday, “around half of the world’s population” suffers from “severe” water shortages for at least part of the year.
According to the World Bank, this climate change-enhanced water scarcity could cost up to 6% of GDP in some regions by 2050 due to impacts on agriculture, health, income and possibly migration, coercion or even conflict.
City versus Farm
Agriculture consumes more than 70% of the world’s water resources, but with urban demand projected to “rise by 80% by 2050, bringing water to urban centers from rural areas has become a current strategy” to meet these new demands, notes the UN firmly .
But that shouldn’t be enough. The number of urban dwellers at risk of water scarcity is expected to increase from 933 million in 2016 to between 1.7 and 2.4 billion in 2050, according to UN-Water. India is expected to be the hardest hit country.
extremes
With global warming, the humidity in the atmosphere increases by about 7% for each additional degree, resulting in more, more intense and less regular precipitation.
According to the report, between 2000 and 2019, floods caused an estimated $650 billion in damage, affected 1.65 billion people and claimed more than 100,000 lives.
Warming also multiplies droughts, which affected 1.43 billion people and caused $130 billion in damage over the same period.
Together, droughts and floods account for more than 75% of humankind’s natural disasters.
Sanitary and hygiene
In 2020, 2 billion people (26% of the population) still lacked safe drinking water and 3.6 billion (46% of the population) lacked access to safely managed sanitation, of which 494 million had no choice but to urinate the opening.
Even in 2020, more than 40% of domestic wastewater was not safely treated before being discharged into the environment.
In addition, 2.3 billion people (29% of the world’s population) lack basic sanitation, including 670 million without handwashing facilities. And at least two billion people drink water contaminated with feces.
Conditions conducive to the spread of cholera, dysentery, or polio. In 2019, 1.4 million deaths were reported to have been caused by a lack of proper hygiene and sanitation facilities.
However, the risks also come from emerging pollutants such as pharmaceuticals and chemicals, pesticides or nanomaterials.
ecosystems
This pollution also affects freshwater ecosystems, which are particularly victims of agricultural runoff.
These ecosystems are “among the most threatened in the world,” notes the report, noting in particular the disappearance of more than 85% of wetlands.
And “the loss of environmental services and biodiversity is expected to continue as natural areas disappear in favor of cultivated land”. Risking “significant” greenhouse gas emissions if peatlands are “drained and converted to farmland”.
financing
Estimates are difficult, but a study cited in the report puts the investment needed to meet the United Nations’ sixth “Sustainable Development Goal” for water and energy by 2030 at more than $1 trillion per year. sanitary facilities for all.
In particular, to ensure universal and equitable access to a drinking water supply by 2030, current investments would have to be tripled.