The world faces a water crisis -- 4 powerful charts show how.

[NNadir]

This comes from the news section of the scientific journal Nature: The world faces a water crisis — 4 powerful charts show how.

The subtitle:

Hundreds of millions of people lack access to safe water and sanitation. Will the first UN conference on water in nearly 50 years make a difference?

A subscription to Nature may be required to read the full article, so I'll just reproduce a little text and the four figures, noting an error in one of them.

Some text:

The United Nations water conference starts tomorrow. Co-hosted by the Netherlands and Tajikistan, the three-day event will take place at UN headquarters in New York and will be the first such event in nearly half a century. During that time, a rising number of people around the world have gained access to safe water and sanitation (see ‘A tale of two halves’) — except in sub-Saharan Africa (see ‘The neglect of Africa’), where the numbers without safe drinking-water services are greater than they were in 2000. Globally, around 500 million people are compelled to use open defecation, and millions more rely on contaminated water supplies. Can this conference make a difference?...

...The first UN water conference took place in Mar del Plata, Argentina, in 1977. Representatives of 118 countries and territories met over 12 days and issued the Mar del Plata Action Plan, which recommended that countries achieve universal clean water and sanitation by 1990 to avoid a global water crisis by the end of the twentieth century.

Several low-income countries asked for financial support, but were rebuffed, and instead a study was proposed on how to finance water projects, as Nature reported at the time.

In 2015, the international community set a 2030 target (under the UN Sustainable Development Goals, SDGs) for providing clean water and sanitation to all. As of 2020, some 2 billion people still lacked safe drinking water in their homes, and around one-third of people did not have basic handwashing facilities at home, according to data from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN children’s agency UNICEF. At current rates of improvement, 1.6 billion people will still lack safe drinking water at home by the 2030 deadline...

The four charts:












One thing that comes through very clearly is the contempt humanity shows for the continent of its origins.

In a moral world - not the one in which we live - we would rethink our priorities.

Have a nice weekend.

[no_hypocrisy]

1. I remember that decades ago, either the Bush Family or Carlyle Group

was buying up water in Uruguay.

[Hortensis]

2. Another is the great advances in this century. Those graphs aren't

of the last 100 years but of the last 22 years. Wow! In the middle of all our troubles we do this!

The one way in which Africa has gotten worse, lack of basic drinking water services, is the one that requires the entire globe to work together to help Africa by stopping CLIMATE CHANGE and growing drought and lack of fresh water. And almost all nations are having a very hard, slow time fixing themselves in that respect.

The world I live in is a world of peoples: Moral to immoral, in which all nations have all kinds of people. But the good we see happening is proof that many humans are moral and are felt across the world.

Happy Saturday.