UNDP’s Global Human Development Report entitled Beyond Scarcity: Power, Poverty and the Global Water Crisis  has been launched by the UNDP Administrator Kemal Dervis and South African President Thabo Mbeki in Cape Town on November 9th 2006. Across much of the developing world, access to clean water is an immeasurably greater threat to human security than violent conflict, according to the report. “Water is a basic human need and a fundamental human right. Access to water, a simple resource that many in rich countries take for granted, has implications for improving life chances, expanding choice, and the exercise of basic human freedoms,” said Kemal Dervis in his openning speech. For the full report, please click.

INEQUALITIES TAKE A TOLL ON HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

According to the Global Human Development Report, the gap between the richest and poorest countries in the world is growing, as human development in sub-Saharan Africa stagnates and progress in other regions accelerates. After a costly setback in human development in the first half of the 1990s, Central and Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) have recovered strongly, and progress since 1990 in East and South Asia continues to accelerate. But sub-Saharan Africa shows no sign of improving, principally because of the devastating effect of HIV/AIDS on life expectancy. 

The countries at the top and bottom of the rankings in the 2006 Human Development Report are unchanged from the 2005 Human Development Report; Norway ranks highest, while Niger is at the bottom of the index. People in Norway are more than 40 times wealthier than people in Niger and they live almost twice as long. They also enjoy near-universal enrollment in primary, secondary and higer education, compared with an enrollment rate of 21 percent in Niger. 

The combined income of the 500 richest people in the world now exceeds that of the poorest 416 million people. 

The 10.8 million child deaths in 2004 bear testimony to inequality in the most fundamental human challenge—staying alive, says the Report. “Being born on the wrong street in the global village carries with it a large risk in terms of survival prospects,” write the authors, who note that only three sub-Saharan African countries will reach the goal of cutting overall rates of child mortality by two-thirds by 2015. Reaching that goal on time would save the lives of 4.4 million children who will otherwise die that year. 

One of the central human-development challenges ahead, the authors stress, is to diminish tolerance for the extreme inequalities that have characterized globalization since the early 1990s, and to ensure that the rising tide of prosperity extends opportunities for the many, and not just the privileged few.

WATER COSTS THE MOST FOR POOR

Across the world, the poor are forced to pay much more for clean water than their affluent neighbours. In the slums of Nairobi (capital of Kenya), the poor pay five to 10 times more per litre of water than wealthy people living in the same city. The poorest households of El Salvador, Nicaragua and Jamaica spend on average over 10 percent of their income on water. In the United Kingdom, by contrast, spending more than three percent of family income on water is considered an economic hardship. 

For 1.1 billion people around the world, water sources can be unreliable, unsafe or beyond their purchasing power. ‘Not having access to clean water’ is a euphemism for profound deprivation. It means that people walk more than one kilometre to the nearest source of clean water for drinking. Or they collect water from drains, ditches or streams that might be infected with pathogens and bacteria which can cause severe illness and death. 

While the rich usually get water from a single supplier, the poor have to reckon with a bewildering array of service providers, such as public standpipes, vendors, truckers, and water carriers. As a result, water delivered through a vendor is often 10 to 20 times more costly than water provided by the public utility. 

2006 Human Development Report advocates for all governments to go beyond vague constitutional principles in enabling legislation to ensure the human right to a secure, accessible and affordable supply of water. At a minimum, this implies a target of at least 20 litres of clean water a day for every citizen—and at no cost for those too poor to pay. 

2006 Human Development Report lays out a number of recommendations on how to make this a reality: 

The 2006 Human Development Report calls for 20 litres of clean water a day for all people as a human right. 

Across much of the developing world, unclean water is an immeasurably greater threat to human security than violent conflict. Yet unlike wars and natural disasters, this global crisis does not galvanise concerted international action. “Like hunger, it is a silent emergency experienced by the poor and tolerated by those with the resources, the technology and the political power to end it” says the 2006 Human Development Report. 

Delivering clean water, removing waste water, and providing sanitation are three of the most basic foundations for human progress. But 1.1 billion people do not have access to water, and 2.6 billion do not have access to sanitation. 

Shoring up the rights of the rural poor, increasing their access to irrigation and new technology and helping them adapt to inevitable climate change will be imperative to ward off disaster. Faced with these challenges, the need for increasing cooperation across national borders to ensure water security for the poor is more tangible than ever; as by 2025, over three billion people could be living in countries under water stress. 

“National governments need to draw up credible plans and strategies for tackling the crisis in water and sanitation. But we also need a Global Action Plan—with active buy-in from the G8 countries—to focus fragmented international efforts to mobilize resources and galvanize political action by putting water and sanitation front and centre on the development agenda,” says the 2006 Report. 

The report estimates the total additional cost of achieving the Millenium Development Goals (MDG) on access to water and sanitation—to be sourced domestically and internationally—at about $10 billion a year. “The $10 billion price tag for the MDG seems a large sum—but it has to be put in context. It represents less than five days’ worth of global military spending and less than half of what rich countries spend each year on mineral water.” 

In addition to creating a Global Action Plan, Human Development Report 2006 recommends that the following three foundations are crucial for success: 

 World sanitation crisis causes millions of avoidable deaths, and contamination from human waste is largely to blame. 2006 Human Development Report shows that the efficacy of human-waste disposal is one of the strongest determinants of child survival around the world. 

More than 2.6 billion people still lack access to proper sanitation, and 1.1 billion people have no regular access to clean water. In many regions of sub-Saharan Africa, people draw water for drinking, cooking and washing from rivers, lakes, ditches and drains fouled with human and animal excrement. In slums like Kibera, outside Nairobi (Kenya), people defecate in plastic bags and throw them into the street because they have no other option...  

As a result, 1.8 million children die from diarrhoea each year.  

Improving sanitation in the home— advancing from open defecation to using a pit latrine to installing a flush toilet—reduces overall child mortality by about a third. 

The crisis in water and sanitation is—above all—a crisis for the poor. More than 660 million people without sanitation live on US$2 or less a day, and more than 385 million live on $1 or less a day. 

However, instead of being recognized as the international emergency it is, sanitation is entirely absent from political campaigns and public debate. The realities of open defecation are relegated to backroom politics. Because the crisis in sanitation overwhelmingly targets the poor, its taboo remains stubbornly intact.

Women’s burden is even bigger

Gender inequality is a second major impediment to progress. Young girls, particularly after puberty, are less likely to attend classes if schools do not have suitable hygiene facilities. About half the girls in Sub-Saharan Africa who drop out of school do so because of poor water and sanitation facilities. 

Solution from the ground up

Grassroots action combined with government leadership can improve sanitation for the poor. In the Orangi slum of Pakistan’s capital, Karachi, public participation in a grassroots sanitation project has helped bring about a drop in infant mortality from 130 deaths per 1,000 live births in the early 1980s to fewer than 40 deaths per 1,000 live births today.  

Ten years ago, Bangladesh had one of the lowest levels in the world of access to proper sanitation in its rural areas. It is now on target to achieve nationwide sanitation coverage by 2010, thanks to a ‘total sanitation campaign’ promoted by NGOs and  local authorities. 

2006 Human Development Report lays out the following steps as prerequisites for progress: 

Poor farmers face a potentially catastrophic water crisis from the combination of climate change and competition for scarce water resources. However, stronger rights, better irrigation and adaptation to global warming can avert catastrophe—if they arrive in time, says 2006 Human Development Report. 

The great majority of the world’s malnourished people—estimated now at 830 million —is small farmers, herders, and farm labourers. The regions where the world’s hungry are now concentrated will have to absorb the bulk of the planet’s additional population over the next decades, estimated at 2.4 billion by 2050. And as most of them will be dependent on rainfed agriculture, the number of those at risk will continue to rise. 

Climate change threatens to intensify water insecurity on an unparalleled scale. Even with an agreement to mitigate carbon emissions through international cooperation, dangerous climate change is now almost inevitable, and the most severe consequences will be experienced by countries and people who bear no responsibility for the problem. Parts of sub-Saharan Africa are facing crop losses of up to 25 percent from climate-change-induced weather patterns. Meanwhile, accelerated glacial melt and reduced rainfall threaten major food systems in South Asia.

As climate change disproportionately hurts the rural poor who depend on agriculture but lack established rights, economic empowerment and a political voice, increasing competition for water has the potential to push these people ever closer to disaster. More and more, farmers are losing out to the growing thirst of cities and industries. Within agriculture, larger commercial producers are siphoning off the lifeline water supplies of poorer farmers, who then can neither produce a secure food supply for themselves nor begin to compete with these commercial rivals, let alone the heavily subsidized agricultural might of the developed world.

Compounding the formidable dual challenge of competition and climate change is the fact that the number of people who need to be fed continues to rise. And as people get wealthier, they tend to eat different things, and meat and sugar are much more water-intensive to produce than wheat or rice. Producing a single hamburger takes about 11,000 litres of water—roughly the same daily allotment as that of 500 residents of an urban slum without a household water connection. 

Solutions for the future

2006 Global Human Development Report recommends three primary courses of action to address the crisis threatening poor farmers: 

COOPERATION INSTEAD OF WATER WARS

Challenging predictions that increasing competition for water will inevitably provoke armed conflicts, the 2006 Human Development Report finds that cross-border cooperation over water resources is already far more pervasive and successful than is commonly presumed. 

90% of the world’s population lives in countries that share their water supplies with other countries. This interdependence can give rise to political tension across borders, but most shared water resources are managed peacefully through cross-border engineering and diplomacy. 

Problems start when water—from rivers, lakes, aquifers or wetlands—is not managed properly. While most countries have institutional rules and regulations for allocating water and resolving disputes within their boundaries, cross-border mechanisms are much weaker, and the mix of water stress and flimsy institutions can carry a real risk of conflict. 

In the past 50 years, there have been 37 cases of reported violence between states over water; all but seven incidences took place in the Middle East. Yet over the same period, more than 200 treaties on water were negotiated between countries, says the 2006 Human Development Report. 

Water scarcity is an acute problem throughout the Middle East. Nowhere is this more starkly apparent than in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The Palestinian population is half the size of Israel’s, but consumes only 10–15 percent as much water. 

One of the world’s most visible environmental disasters, the Aral Sea bears testimony to the cost of non-cooperation in transboundary water management. The diversion of water for half a century to support cotton through an inefficient irrigation system strangled the Aral Sea, then the world’s fourth-largest lake. By the 1990s it was receiving less than one-tenth of its previous flow—and sometimes no water at all. In the past few years, however, some Aral Sea nations have begun to reverse some of the damage, protecting watersheds and controlling drainage out of the Aral Sea with new dams and canals, with the result that water levels are rising for the first time in a generation. 

In 1960 the Aral Sea was the size of Belgium, sustaining a vibrant local economy. Today, it is a virtually lifeless hypersaline lake a quarter of its previous size.

On the other hand, for countries like Bangladesh, which depends on India for 91 percent of its water to irrigate crops and replenish aquifers, the case is clear for cross-border cooperation on water.  

Throughout history, cooperation over shared water resources has been the rule, not the exception. With more people competing for resources than ever, more ambitious and less fragmented approaches to water governance are in the interest of everyone’s long-term security. 

To do this, 2006 Human Development Report recommends increased emphasis on the following: