Wastewater - Turning Problem to Solution

and healthy and sustainable environment, ensuring this right is recognized by the United Nations and its 193 Member States. While not binding, the resolution sets an expectation on Member States to enshrine the right to a healthy environment within national and multilateral treaties. This resolution is an opportunity to step up efforts against pollution at all levels. It calls on Member States to ensure that people have access to a “clean, healthy and sustainable environment”, and provides safeguards for people to stand up for their rights, including

the right to live in a non-toxic environment with safe and sufficient water. Ensuring this human right will require countries and relevant stakeholders to progress wastewater management and sanitation provision. Addressing wastewater pollution and lack of sanitation has direct, positive repercussions on our daily lives and the environment, and is essential to the realization of this and other human rights.

Addressing wastewater is key to achieving success in key policy areas

Water is a key enabler, providing multiple co-benefits. It cuts across policy sectors, from the New Urban Agenda to the Paris Agreement on climate change, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, the Kunming Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification. Water cooperation has been identified as an imperative for global peace and security (High-Level Panel on Water and Peace 2017; Council of the European Union 2018), as well as for dismantling stereotypes to accelerate gender equity, for example through the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Water Assessment Programme (WWAP) Water and Gender Working Group’s Call to Action that was launched in 2021 (WWAP 2021). A third of the global population live in water scarce regions (Ruiz 2020), and expectations are that water scarcity could displace up to 700 million people by 2030 (Hameeteman 2013) and act as a multiplier to shortages of other key resources (World Economic Forum 2023). In 2010, at the time of the publication of the Sick Water? report, the MDGs had the ambition to reduce by half the number of people lacking access to safe drinking water and sanitation by 2015. Wastewater quality and the management of wastewater was not, however, explicitly addressed in the MDGs, and according to Tortajada (2020), this represented an important limitation in realizing this goal. The adoption of SDG 6 under the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (“the 2030 Agenda”) in 2015 (see box 2) addressed this shortcoming (United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs [DESA] 2015; Tortajada 2020).

In 2016, following the adoption of the SDGs, the United Nations General Assembly declared an International Decade for Action on Water for Sustainable Development from 2018–2028 (“the Water Action Decade” (A/ RES/71/222) (United Nations, General Assembly 2016), aiming to bring visibility to the issue and accelerate global efforts to address water-related challenges. SDG 6, with wastewater management and resource recovery for reuse, is an integral part of the Decade for Action. Despite increased visibility within the 2030 Agenda, and in particular SDG 6, cooperation on wastewater issues still suffers from lack of visibility in international processes. The review of SDG 6 by the high-level political forum on sustainable development in 2018 concluded that “the world is not on track to achieve SDG 6 by 2030” (United Nations 2018). In many regions, achieving ambitions for SDG 6 and effective water management will require institutional reform to create regulatory frameworks that can channel resources, encourage innovation and provide the necessary guidance incentives to support unconventional approaches. Marking the midpoint of the Water Action Decade, the United Nations 2023 Water Conference in New York, co-hosted by the Kingdom of the Netherlands and Tajikistan, has provided an opportunity for an in-depth review of progress towards SDG 6, with only seven years remaining before the goals expire. The need to address the whole of the water cycle and progress to achieving a net-zero water industry was highlighted as an important issue that would require cooperation across sectors and governance scales (DESA 2022). Several leaders during the conference highlighted the need to accelerate

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