MISCONCEPTION: MEETING THE MDG TARGETS FOR WATER AND SANITATION MEANS THE PROBLEM IS SOLVED

James M. Hughes

Director, Center for Global Safe Water
Emory University

In 2000, the UN adopted eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to help end human poverty and its ramifications. Among the goals is a call to reduce by half the proportion of persons without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015. Although meeting this target will benefit many who currently lack water and sanitation access, expanded coverage will not solve the global problem.

Even if the international community succeeds in reaching the targets, a substantial proportion of the world's population will still rely on unimproved water sources and remain at risk for water-related morbidity and mortality. The MDGs call for enhanced access to improved water sources but do not consider the critical issue of water quality: access to an improved water source does not necessarily mean access to safe water. In rural areas, distant water sources require collection, transportation, and storage - with opportunities for contamination at each step. In these areas, the burden of access to water falls disproportionately on women, who are responsible for the majority of daily water collection, and on children, who are most affected by the related health burden and in whom severe, prolonged diarrhea can lead to impaired physical and cognitive development. In the slums of the rapidly growing mega-cities of the developing world, where pressure from rapid population growth jeopardizes already outdated and overtaxed municipal water systems, even treated water is vulnerable to pathogen entry at many points along the distribution pathway. The result is unsafe water at the household level, with attendant risks to health.

MISCONCEPTION: ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT HERALDS CLEANER WATER

Sunita Narain

Director, Centre for Science and Environment
New Delhi, India

We know that dirty water has deadly impacts on health. But the treatment of wastewater requires a better understanding of what actually is polluting the water. If its water has biological contaminants, a society is presumed to be water-traditional and poor. It can't even treat its own human sewage. In many ways, a society is considered industrialized (and rich) once cocktails of trace toxic pollutants are detected in wastewater. From arsenic and mercury to hormones and pesticides to even more deadly dioxins and furans, industrialization poses new problems to clean water.

What then would one say of water with all three pollutants - biological, crude, and chemical? In simple terms, it points to a society in deep trouble. It has the burden of treating both traditional and modern types of pollution. When treatment fails, there is an additional double-burden: the treatment of both water-borne diseases and diseases like cancers and genetic disorders that arise from chemical contamination.

Even as industry universalizes the use of chemicals, there has been no universal attempt to mitigate the deadly effects of its discharge. The reason is that waste treatment is another business; it must be profitable to clean our water. This principle works when society has money, but in large parts of this poor and polluted South, modern technologies for cleaning waste are out of reach. It is here the challenge lies: to reinvent the paradigm of waste treatment by reinventing the paradigm of the waste generation itself