Towards a green economy Key messages

1. Water, a basic necessity for sustaining life, goes undelivered to many of the world’s poor. Nearly 1 billion people lack access to clean drinking water; 2.6 billion lack access to improved sanitation services; and 1.4 million children under five die every year as a result of lack of access to clean water and adequate sanitation services. At the current rate of investment progress, the Millennium Development Goal for sanitation will be missed by 1 billion people, mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia.

2. The existing inadequacies in provision of water and sanitation services generate considerable

social costs and economic inefficiencies. When people do not have access to water, either large amounts of their disposable income have to be spent on purchasing water from vendors or large amounts of time, in particular from women and children, have to be devoted to carting it. This erodes the capacity of the poor to engage in other activities. When sanitation services are inadequate, the costs of water-borne disease are high. Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam, for instance, together lose about US$ 9 billion a year because of poor sanitation – or approximately 2 per cent of combined GDP. Access to reliable, clean water and adequate sanitation services for all is a foundation of a green economy.

3. Continuing current practices will lead to a massive and unsustainable gap between global supply and demand for water withdrawal. This is exacerbated by failure to collect and treat

used water to enable subsequent uses. With no improvement in the efficiency of water use, water demand is projected to overshoot supply by 40 per cent in 20 years time. Historical levels of improvement in water productivity, as well as increases in supply (such as through the construction of dams and desalination plants as well as increased recycling) are expected to address 40 per cent of this gap, but the remaining 60 per cent needs to come from investment in infrastructure, water-policy reform and in the development of new technology. The failure of such investment or policy reform to materialise will lead to the deepening of water crises.

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