"Vampiric overconsumption is draining the lifeblood of our planet — water." These words from the United Nations Secretary-General, given in a speech in February, reflect growing international recognition that without major new commitments on water management, access and quality, the entire 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda could be in jeopardy.
World Water Day, celebrated on 22 March, this year coincides with the start of the UN 2023 Water Conference, a key opportunity to unite the world around solving the water and sanitation crisis. The day also sees the launch of the annual World Water Development Report, UN-Water’s flagship report on water and sanitation issues, provisionally entitled Accelerating Change through Partnerships and Cooperation.
A prerequisite for progress on the agenda is accurate, joined up, locally relevant and timely national and international data on water bodies to inform decision-making. Without such data it’s not possible to know if we are moving quickly enough in the right direction.
Shortly before the conference, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) launched Measuring Progress: Water-related ecosystems and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which finds that there has been an improvement in data availability for the 92 environment-related SDG indicators, but also exposes some of the weaknesses in water-related data.
Thanks to more countries providing additional data, in 2022, indicators with sufficient data to analyze were estimated at 59 per cent, up from 42 per cent in 2020 and 34 per cent in 2018.
The improved reporting related mainly to SDGs 6 on fresh water, 7 on energy, 12 on sustainable consumption and production, 13 on climate change, 14 on life below water and 15 on life on land, with most improvement in data availability reported in the Latin America and Caribbean, North Africa and Europe regions.
This improvement in data availability is due to a sustained investment by countries in their national statistical systems to collect and report data for SDG indicators as part of their sustainable development programmes, supported by capacity development efforts by UNEP and other custodian agencies, says the report.
At the same time, the report exposes some of the critical data gaps in water-related ecosystems and has challenged the suitability of some indicators to detect meaningful change in the health of freshwater- and marine-related ecosystems. The freshwater-related ecosystem analysis was limited to interlinkages between various metrics of the area of fresh water within each country, with limited insight/data availability about water quality. Similarly, the lack of disaggregated catchment-level data constrained the ability to meaningfully assess coastal ecosystems.
“In future there may be opportunities to further utilize citizen science, satellite imagery, low-cost in-situ monitoring, and big data to better measure water quality and/or volume within various water bodies,” says Therese El Gemayel, primary coordinator and a lead author of the report.
The analysis identified strong interlinkages related to policies that integrate land and water conservation, ensure suitable water infrastructure in urban areas, mitigate pollution, and address impacts from water withdrawals associated with economic activity. However, the report noted that water use efficiency indicators were interlinked to freshwater-related ecosystems only at a national level.
“These are all areas where there’s a lot still to do to get back on track in terms of achieving the water-related SDGs,” says El Gemayel.
It is important to note that measuring the progress of the 92 environment-related SDG indicators focuses on evaluating trends but does not assess the magnitude of the trends or progress towards meeting targets associated with specific indicators.
“While some water datasets provide consistent measurement using remote sensing across the globe, they are limited in their ability to measure the water quality, volumes, or ecosystem health of water bodies,” adds El Gemayel.
Improved water quality information can help tackle pollution
Pollution action is one of the three focuses of UNEP’s strategy up to 2025, and measuring water quality is a key part of being able to assess progress. Land-based pollution sources are varied. Water bodies are polluted when fertilizer run-off washes nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen into them, sometimes causing algal blooms that kill fish. Chemical pollution from industry, homes and hospitals, along with plastic and other pollutants, far too often end up in lakes, rivers and the ocean.
Studies show that climate change exacerbates the problem when, for example, longer dry periods reduce water levels and concentrate pollutants within water bodies, which in turn degrades these ecosystems and reduces their ability to provide services to societies and economies.
This year’s theme for World Water Day is centered around partnerships and cooperation to accelerate change, and UNEP convenes or co-convenes a number of crucial ones such as the World Water Quality Alliance, the Global Programme of Action for the Protection of the Marine Environment from Land-Based Activities and its streams of work on the Global Wastewater Initiative and the Global Partnership on Nutrient Management.
Pollution action is the focus of this year’s World Environment Day on 5 June and in the coming months UNEP will be releasing COVID-19 and the Water Sector, a deep dive assessment and literature review of COVID-19 pollution and other impacts on the water sector, as well as the latest report in its Sick Water series, which emphasizes the urgent need to address wastewater pollution and exploit the benefits of wastewater reuse.
For further information please contact Lis Mullin Bernhardt: lis.bernhardt@un.org
