Page 58 - Frontier Technologies to Protect the Environment and Tackle Climate Change

Frontier Technologies to Protect the Environment and Tackle Climate Change

overall state, use and management of the world’s freshwater resources. This fact-based publication
looks at the current and imminent freshwater-related challenges from a thematic perspective (with
a focus on water and climate change in its 2020 edition and valuing water in its 2021 edition) and
reports on the progress being made towards achieving SDG 6 targets on clean water and sanitation.

Box 11: Facts and figures related to water consumption 171

Water consumption: Facts and figures
• Around 4 billion people – nearly two-thirds of the world’s population – experience
severe water scarcity during at least one month of the year.
• 700 million people worldwide could be displaced by intense water scarcity by 2030.
• 2.1 billion people live without safe water at home.

• One in four primary schools have no drinking water service, with pupils using
unprotected sources or going thirsty.
• More than 700 children under five years of age die every day from diarrhea linked to
unsafe water and poor sanitation.
• Globally, 80 per cent of the people who use unsafe and unprotected water sources
live in rural areas.
• Women and girls are responsible for water collection in eight out of ten households
with water off-premises.
• For the 68.5 million people who have been forced to flee their homes, accessing safe
water services is highly problematic.
• Around 159 million people collect their drinking water from less safe surface water,
such as ponds and streams.

To ensure tangible global progress to mitigate this issue, there are increased calls for smart, real-time
monitoring of urban water supply systems and further decreases in apparent water losses (i.e. those
occurring through customer meter errors, billing data inaccuracies or unauthorized consumption), as
well as in real water losses (those occurring through water leakage and storage overflows). To this end,
the UNECE - WHO/Europe Protocol on Water and Health was adopted in 1999 and entered into force in
2005. The Protocol aims to protect human health and well-being through better water management,
including the protection of water ecosystems, and by preventing, controlling and reducing water-
related diseases. It is the first international agreement of its kind adopted specifically to attain an
adequate supply of safe drinking water and adequate sanitation for everyone, and to seek to protect
water used as a source of drinking water.

To illustrate that smart monitoring and management of water supplies does work, Figure 15 shows
the significant global rise in agricultural water withdrawal as a percentage of total renewable water
resources over the last few decades, prior to the more widespread introduction of smart water
management and water saving schemes.

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