Water for people.pdf - WHO Thailand Digital Repository

5 1 0 / F I T T I N G T H E P I E C E S T O G E T H E RThe World’s Water Crisis: Fitting the Pieces TogetherFigure 23.2: Regional environmental trendsSource: GEO1, 1997.Land: degradationForest: loss, degradationBiodiversity: loss, habitat fragmentationFreshwater: scarcity, pollutionMarine and coastal zones: degradationAtmosphere: pollutionUrban and industrial: contamination, wasteAfricain urban and rural areas respectively. In global terms, the continenthouses 27 percent of the world’s population that is without accessto improved water supply, and 13 percent without access toimproved sanitation. Ten countries have less than 50 percentcoverage for both their current national water supply and sanitationcoverage. Urban services have remained more or less the sameacross the 1990s; rural services, however, tell a different story aswater supply increased slightly and rural sanitation fell. The Africanpopulation is expected to increase by 65 percent over the nexttwenty-five years, with the greatest increases in urban areas.Meeting the 2015 targets will require tripling the rate at whichadditional people gained access to water between 1990 and 2000and quadrupling the rate at which they improved sanitation.The gap between the proportion of urban dwellers with‘improved’ provision and provision that is ‘safe and sufficient’ isevident in many African nations. Whereas 86 percent of urbandwellers have ‘improved’ supplies, more than half have inadequateprovision if the definition is to mean a house connection or yardtap. Many city studies now suggest that the proportion of peoplewith sanitation that is safe and convenient is much lower than theproportion with ‘improved’ sanitation. In most of the largest cities inAfrica, less than 10 percent of their inhabitants have sewerconnections. Tens of millions of households, especially in informalsettlements, only have access to overused and poorly maintainedcommunal or public toilets. In many African cities, only 10 to30 percent of all urban households’ solid wastes are collected.Asia-PacificEurope& formerUSSRLatinAmericaandCaribbeanNorthAmericaIncreasing Remaining relatively stable Decreasing Not applicable, not knownWestAsiaPolarregionsFor African children under five, the health burden that arises fromdiarrhoeal disease linked to inadequate water, sanitation and hygieneis up to 240 times higher than in high-income nations. Malaria takesits heaviest toll in Africa south of the Sahara, where about 85.7 percentof the annual global rate of over 1.1 million deaths occur, mainlyamong children under five. It is the leading cause of death in youngchildren and constitutes 10 percent of the overall disease burden, andslows economic growth in African countries by 1.3 percent a year. Ofthe estimated 256.7 million people worldwide infected byschistosomiasis (bilharzia), 212.6 million (82.8 percent) cases occur inAfrica south of the Sahara. Urban populations in Africa are alsoamong the most affected by lymphatic filariasis.In the 1990s, 58 percent of sixty-seven urban cities in twentyninenations (including most of the continent’s largest cities) wereusing rivers 25 or more kilometres away, and just over half thatrelied on rivers depended on interbasin transfers. As is commonthroughout the developing world, very few cities in Africa haverivers flowing through them that are not heavily polluted, and muchthe same applies to nearby lakes, estuaries and seas.Per capita food consumption, and associated calorific andnutritional intake, has remained disappointingly low in sub-SaharanAfrica over the past forty-five years. The number of undernourishedAfricans rose steeply during the 1990s. While the total number ofundernourished people worldwide has fallen, the proportion of thesub-Saharan Africa population has remained virtually unchanged. Foodsecurity actions therefore take on a special urgency in this region.