By: Alyssa Huffman
Where there is water, there is life. From the proliferation of civilization to the development of new nations, water serves as the foundation of humankind. Today, we recognize water as a human right; beyond that, the United Nations (UN) acknowledges clean water and sanitation as essential to the realization of all human rights. In 2015, the UN Member States emphasized this right by adopting a set of seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to call for universal action to end poverty and ensure a safe and healthy planet. In particular, SDG 6 aims to ensure access to safe water, sanitation, and hygiene for all. By proffering this SDG, the UN encouraged nations to take action in addressing water scarcity issues faced by their people. Worldwide implementation of policies at the national level led to improvements in global water access following SDG 6. By 2020, seventy-four percent of the global population had access to safely managed drinking water. But despite this progress, the world is not on track to fulfilling the goal of SDG 6 by 2030—large geographic and demographic disparities in access to water leave underrepresented groups behind in the global movement towards SDG 6. With the 2030 deadline looming, international and national policymakers must implement measures to ensure equitable allocation of resources to the communities most vulnerable to ongoing water crises.
In countries with relatively high water access, marginalized communities are the ones that still lack clean water and sanitation. A prominent example of this is in the United States. While 97% of the United States population currently has access to a safely managed drinking water service, the remaining 3% is often ‘invisible’ and underserved by federal and local governments. In the United States, gaps in access are predominantly associated with race—Black, Hispanic, and Native American households are more likely to lack safely managed water. The Navajo Nation faces a particularly prominent water crisis as a subnational sovereign entity. Almost one-third of the Navajo Nation lacks access to reliable drinking water, with decades of drought and reliance on the over-tapped Colorado River forcing tribe members to travel miles to refill water jugs. Yet in Arizona v. Navajo Nation, the Supreme Court asserted that the federal government had no duty to secure water for the tribe. In what is considered a globally affluent population, low-income and indigenous communities still face prohibitive costs of implementing water treatment systems, a lack of state and federal funding to address their water quality crises, and an inherent gap in knowledge and public support that are essential to allocating equitable resources. SDG 6 in the United States suffers from an obstruction of environmental injustice—marginalized communities face severe gaps in access to clean water, sanitation services, and hygiene. In order to meet the goals of SDG 6 by 2030, these gaps in access must be addressed.
Other nations and occupied territories face similar disparities in who has access to safely managed water. Since 2015, climate change has led to a growing water crisis in South Africa, coming to a peak in 2018 when South Africa faced an extreme water shortage. South Africa is one of the few countries whose constitution includes the right to clean water, yet unequal access to water reveals flaws in the execution of that right. In 2002, all-white suburbs, accounting for less than one-tenth of South Africa’s population, made up over half of the water consumption in the country. Black populations bear the brunt of South Africa’s water crisis, reflecting a continuing struggle to overcome the nation’s apartheid legacy and threatening the ability of the world to equitably achieve water access for all. This inequity is reflected across the globe, with water bills in globally affluent countries accounting for a negligible percent of household income while accounting for as much as forty-five percent of household income in low-income countries.
International conflict and the weaponization of water further infringe on people’s basic right to water access. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, damage to Ukrainian infrastructure has left millions of people without running water. Damage to reservoirs and natural bodies of water not only harms the environment but also leaves millions of people in crisis without a reliable source of water. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, one of the wettest nations in Africa, safe water is still a sparse resource as a result of decades of conflict leading to deteriorating infrastructure. Over thirty-three million people lack access to safe water in the Congo. Finally, Israeli control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip has led to the withholding of water resources from Palestinians living within the boundaries of Gaza. Israel maintains control of shared water resources in the region, reserving eighty-five percent of the water for itself and only delegating fifteen percent of the water to the four million Palestinians within the West Bank. With the recent bombing of the West Bank and Gaza, damaged or shut-down water and sanitation systems led to extreme outbreaks of disease with over 33,000 cases of diarrhea reported, half of which are in children under the age of five. The control of water and targeting of water and sanitation systems in these times of conflict have proven to be deadly. Access to clean water is a human right, and must therefore include times of international conflict to avoid catastrophic consequences against civilian populations.
The right to water is not only an environmental issue—it is an issue of human rights, of global conflict, of economics, and of race and ethnicity. At the rate we are going, SDG 6 will not be achieved by 2030. Efforts to provide access to safely managed water must drastically increase to come anywhere near the proffered goals. But beyond generally aiming to provide greater access to water, nations must also focus on which demographics lack access to water. Indigenous, black, and underrepresented communities face extreme inequity in the percentage of their populations that lack access to safely managed water. And with an increase in global conflict, the weaponization of water further strips people of a basic human necessity. SDG 6 merely outlines what should be considered a basic human right—water is required for life, yet billions of people around the globe still lack access to this necessity. Reallocation of resources to underrepresented communities on both the national and international levels is essential to ensure fair and equitable access to clean and safe water.
