NAIROBI, KENYA: A special advisory board to the United Nations now calls for major institutional upgrades for the world to meet water and sanitation-related objectives in 2030 agenda.
The board, created in 2004 by former UN Secretary General Koffi Annan to advance water-related Millennium Development Goal targets highlights seven key areas to address water and sanitation concerns.
It calls on the World to bring sanitation to mainstream, demand for UN attention to pollution prevention, wastewater treatment and safe reuse, and underscores need for drinking water to be more managed, monitored and made safe.
Other highlights include building attention to water through the creation of a will to act now and in the future, push for increased and improved financial flows, and to catalyze better water resources management.
"There is currently a mismatch between the integrated and ambitious 2030 vision of freshwater and sanitation management and the international political structures available to contribute to its implementation," says the report, presented by UN Secretary-General's Advisory Board on Water and Sanitation (UNSGAB) Chair Uschi Eid to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at UN headquarters, New York.
The Board's report underlines that water; sanitation and hygiene are central to human health and contains blunt messaging with the constructive intent of enhancing the UN's handling of water issues, which have been accorded newly elevated status within the world body.
"Considering that a lot of UN organizations are dealing with water but only as a marginal issue, nothing less than a full-scale water-cultural revolution within the UN is needed," the report says.
"Relevant UN organisations need to allocate (more) core funding to water and need to review their policies. It is, for example, high time that World Health Organisation (WHO) endorsed water, sanitation and hygiene as primary prevention."
Noting "persistent and serious data inconsistencies in water-related UN communications," the Board says a 2012 claim that the global goal for safe drinking water goal had been met was underpinned by the wrong assumption that all "improved" water sources provide safe, uncontaminated water.
UNSGAB points out "there is a difference between a drinking water source that is only 'improved' and drinking water that is truly safe."
"In many quarters, the correction has been made: safe means safe, that is, uncontaminated. However, in too many others, including official UN statements, the fallacy persists and the global need for safe drinking water is thus seriously underestimated."
The UNSGAB report also calls for global-level UN data to better illuminate back-sliding in access to water and sanitation services in cities: "the global regression seen today in urban areas is not currently being explicitly reported.”
Among other UNSGAB observations and recommendations include, a Heads of State Panel on Water to champion and lead global advocacy around critical issues.
A global approach to water, noting that "globalizing forces, such as virtual water flows, increasing water scarcity, water pollution and ecological degradation, intensifying water-related disasters and persistent and emerging global public health threats ... in many parts of the world, need to be more systematically addressed from a global perspective."
The Standard Group Plc is a
multi-media organization with investments in media platforms spanning newspaper
print operations, television, radio broadcasting, digital and online services. The
Standard Group is recognized as a leading multi-media house in Kenya with a key
influence in matters of national and international interest.
join