Credit: United Nations

By Guillaume Baggio and Manzoor Qadir
HAMILTON, Canada, Oct 20 2022 (IPS)

Global progress has been staggeringly inadequate against Sustainable Development Goal 6, “clean water and sanitation for all.”

According to the latest SDGs progress assessment, 2 billion people still lack safely managed drinking water, 3.6 billion lack sanitation services, and 3 billion lack basic hygiene services.

Waterborne diseases continue to take a heavy toll on the global community, with hotspots in developing countries most acutely affected.

To address this crisis, the United Nations launched the SDG 6 Global Acceleration Framework in 2020 to fast-track progress. The framework is a roadmap for aligning national policies and financial resources and scaling up action at all levels, but it has two fundamental flaws that need to be addressed.

Impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic

First, the Framework largely overlooks the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the means by which safe drinking water, sanitation, and hygiene services will be provided where needed.

The pandemic badly affected and continues to affect the financial, political, and institutional structures and the social fabric of countries. Debt and inflation in many countries are rising while foreign investment declined by 35 per cent from 2019 to 2021.

The ability to make critical capital improvements has also been drastically affected during the pandemic, causing a delay in completing planned water and sanitation infrastructure and further enfeebling already underfunded services in developing countries.

Global and national financial, political, and institutional structures need to be reshaped, and the social fabric repaired as part of a truly transformative sustainability agenda.

Undervaluing SDGs interlinkages

Second, the SDG 6 Global Acceleration Framework undervalues the potential of strengthening interlinkages across SDGs. While it recognizes the importance of SDG 6 interlinkages, it does not call for systematic change in traditional forms of decision-making in the water and sanitation sector.

The risks of addressing SDGs individually without considering their interlinkages was the subject of warnings early in this global process. Moreover, SDG interlinkages are context-specific and depend on several factors, such as geography, governance, or socio-economic conditions.

The current economic slowdown could push another 263 million people into extreme poverty in 2022 — a number roughly equal to the combined populations of Germany, France, the UK and Spain — further compounding challenges across critical dimensions of sustainable development, such as health, education, gender, and water and sanitation.

Policy coherence is indispensable to sustainable development. A post-pandemic framework for sustainability requires policies that are mutually supportive across multiple sectors. Countries must move on from merely identifying interlinkages between SDGs to strengthening and acting on them.

Two actions to bridge the gaps

The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic clearly necessitate better coordinated multi-sectoral policies. Next year, UN Member States meet at the UN 2023 Water Conference for the midterm review of the Water Action Decade 2018-2028, an effort to galvanize social, economic, and environmental action.

National decision-makers and development actors need to act on the following recommendations:

1. Prioritizing critical SDG 6 targets in the post-pandemic context. This means reshaping and strengthening today’s inadequate means of implementation and coming to the UN 2023 Water Conference with bold pledges, concentrating resources on bringing drinking water, sanitation, and hygiene services to the most vulnerable people — women and girls, migrants, the urban poor, schools, and hospitals, by 2030.

2. Harnessing the potential of SDGs interlinkages in policies and implementation plans at all levels. Accelerating the achievement of SDG 6 supports many other SDGs, particularly those related to health, education, food, gender equality, energy, and climate change. In the context of scarce financial resources and insufficient capacity, countries can prioritize strongly interlinked SDGs to yield achievements across multiple sectors.

We have seen and heard continuous global commitments to support the necessary conditions for sustainable development. In the post-pandemic context, progress in the water and sanitation sector has a new multifaceted purpose offering a wealth of benefits. It is time to realize them.

Guillaume Baggio is a Research Assistant at the Department of Physical and Environmental Sciences, University of Toronto, and Manzoor Qadir is Assistant Director at the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health.

UNU-INWEH is supported by the Government of Canada and hosted by McMaster University.

IPS UN Bureau

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

A wastewater treatment facility in Manila, the Philippines. Credit: Danilo Pinzon/World Bank

By Manzoor Qadir
HAMILTON, Canada, Aug 26 2021 (IPS)

Understanding the scale and intensity of the COVID-19 virus and its emerging variants, predicting the pandemic’s direction, and developing and refining associated management response options are challenges likely to confront public-health officials and national governments worldwide well into the future.

Diagnostic testing capacity for COVID-19 varies widely from country to country and often is insufficient. Hospital admissions can lag infections by weeks and asymptomatic or mild cases go unreported.

One diagnostic option drawing growing attention and application: Detecting COVID-19 in community and urban wastewater.

Monitoring wastewater for COVID-19 offers near real-time insights into the scale of the virus’ presence among a vast number of people, and can reveal the community’s transmission trajectory – rising or falling.

Sewers offer an early warning system for COVID-19 outbreaks. Wastewater with higher concentrations of the virus corresponds to higher numbers of infected people. Compared to systematic testing of individuals, wastewater analysis is not only less invasive and simpler, it requires fewer resources, equipment, and skilled professionals.

Detecting viruses in a community this way has been practiced since the early 1990s when extensive wastewater surveillance supported efforts to eradicate polio. Such experience over the years has proven that monitoring wastewater for pathogen traces is a reliable and effective disease surveillance technique.

Armies of researchers with enhanced pandemic funding worldwide have been pursuing wastewater monitoring since the WHO’s initial COVID-19 alarms last year.

A Google search of “COVID and wastewater” shows over 53 million results, and Google Scholar reveals around 20,000 publications on the subject, one-third of them produced since the beginning of 2021.

One expert paper this year proposed an archived time series of urban sewage samples as a record of pandemics and other features of the evolving Anthropocene — an invaluable resource for future anthropologists.

Most success stories about COVID-19 surveillance in wastewater and sewage sludge have come from developed countries. In the developing world, however, the picture is very different. Unfortunately, about 90% of wastewater generated in low-income developing countries is not even collected; it is released to the environment untreated. In lower-middle-income countries, about 57% of wastewater is uncollected.

Monitoring wastewater for COVID-19 enables timely preventive and coping measures, which would help developing nations immensely. The “dirty secret” in many such countries, however, is that wastewater goes untreated into the environment — often entering freshwater bodies through hidden or visible pipes, for example, or contaminating groundwater.

Wastewater monitoring, collection, treatment, and safe reuse or disposal is essential for protecting human health and the absence of such practices leads to massive water pollution. Sadly, it also creates a missed opportunity for near-real-time disease surveillance, depriving about half of the global population of the benefits of timely response to outbreaks of COVID-19, with similar virus-induced diseases and pandemics foreseen.

The international disparity in these pathogen early warning systems is a wakeup call for the world at large, which aims at halving the volumes of untreated wastewater by 2030 (Sustainable Development Goal SDG, 6.3.1 of the 2030 Global Sustainability Agenda).

Six years into the SDG era, the assessment of wastewater treatment status at the national level reveals a gloomy scenario in low-income and lower-middle-income countries, which are far from achieving the wastewater treatment and safe reuse target agreed to in 2015.

With more frequent pandemic-like situations expected in years to come, a radical rethinking is widely needed, and efficient wastewater management and monitoring must be established in developing countries to protect our environment and countless lives.

Establishing wastewater collection and conveyance networks, and constructing wastewater treatment plants equipped with near-real-time diagnostic systems for diseases like COVID-19 are key to improving human health in low-income and lower-middle-income countries. Other tactics include implementing effluent standards and offering incentives for households and industrial sectors.

Beyond expanding these disease early warning systems globally, effective wastewater collection and management in developing countries would yield important resources to offset costs. Wastewater is a source of valuable water, nutrients, precious metals, and energy.

It would also support food production, livelihoods, ecosystems, climate change adaption and mitigation, and sustainable development.

From every viewpoint, the investment required to properly manage wastewater globally pales by comparison to the multidimensional benefits available.

Manzoor Qadir is Assistant Director of the UN University’s Canadian-based Institute for Water, Environment and Health, which is supported by the Government of Canada and hosted at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. The Institute marks its 25th anniversary this year.

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Though most developed countries treat sewage, treatment levels do not generally remove nutrients from the wastewater that is discharged. One exception is the state of Maryland (U.S.) where all major sewage treatment plants are required to upgrade to enhanced nutrient removal technologies that will remove most of the nutrients from the wastewater. Credit: Chesapeake Bay Program

By Manzoor Qadir and Vladimir Smakhtin
HAMILTON, Canada, Feb 5 2020 (IPS)

Vast amounts of valuable energy, agricultural nutrients, and water could be recovered from the world’s fast-growing volume of municipal wastewater.

Some 380 billion cubic meters (1 m3 = 1000 litres) of wastewater are produced annually worldwide — five times the amount of water passing over Niagara Falls annually. That’s enough to fill Africa’s Lake Victoria in roughly seven years, Lake Ontario in four.

Furthermore, wastewater volumes are increasing quickly, with a projected rise of roughly 24% by 2030, 51% by 2050.

Looked at another way, the volume of wastewater roughly equals the annual discharge from the Ganges River in India. By the mid-2030s, it will roughly equal the annual volume flowing through the St. Lawrence River, which drains North America’s five Great Lakes.

Among major nutrients, 16.6 million metric tonnes of nitrogen are embedded in the world’s current annual volume of wastewater, together with 3 million metric tonnes of phosphorus and 6.3 million metric tonnes of potassium.

Theoretically, the recovery of these nutrients could offset 13.4% of global agricultural demand for them.

Recovery of these nutrients in that quantity could generate revenue of $13.6 billion globally at current prices: $9.0 billion in nitrogen, $2.3 billion in phosphorus, and $2.3 billion in potassium.

The energy embedded in wastewater, meanwhile, could provide electricity to 158 million households — roughly the number of households in the USA and Mexico combined.

Beyond the economic gains, environmental benefits of recovering these nutrients include minimizing eutrophication — the phenomenon of excess nutrients causing dense plant growth and aquatic animal deaths due to lack of oxygen.

In its new study, funded by the Government of Canada, the UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) provide these estimates and projections based on a new analysis of the world’s total annual wastewater production.

In many countries, official data on wastewater is often scattered, poorly monitored and reported, or simply unavailable. Nonetheless, our study offers important approximations of global and regional wastewater volumes and insights into its potential benefits.

Our study found that Asia is the largest wastewater producing region by volume — an estimated 159 billion cubic meters, representing 42% of urban wastewater generated globally, with that proportion expected to rise to 44% by 2030.

Other top wastewater-producing regions: North America (67 billion cubic meters) and Europe (68 billion cubic meters) — virtually equal volumes despite Europe’s higher urban population (547 million vs. North America’s 295 million).

The difference is explained by per capita generation: Europeans 124 cubic meters; North Americans 231 cubic meters).

By contrast, Sub-Saharan Africa produces 46 cubic meters of wastewater per capita — about half the global average (95 cubic meters), reflecting limited water supply and poorly-managed wastewater collection systems in most urban settings.

Achieving a high rate of return on wastewater resource recovery will require overcoming a range of constraints. But success would significantly advance progress against the Sustainable Development Goals and others, including adaptation to climate change, ‘net-zero’ energy processes, and a green, circular economy.

It is important to note that many innovative technologies are available today and are being refined to narrow the gap between current and potential resource recovery levels. In the case of phosphorous, for example, recovery rates of up to 90% are already possible.

Also needed to advance progress: to leverage private capital by creating a supportive regulatory and financial environment, particularly in low- and middle-income countries where most municipal wastewater still goes into the environment untreated.

Municipal wastewater was and often still is simply deemed to be filth. However, attitudes are changing with the growing recognition of the enormous potential economic returns and other environmental benefits its proper management represents.

As the demands for freshwater grow and scarce water resources are increasingly stressed, ignoring the opportunity for greater use of safely-managed wastewater is an unthinkable waste.

We hope this study helps inspire the development of national action plans leading to wastewater collection and resource recovery and reuse.

Safely managed, wastewater is a key achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SDG 6.3, which calls on the world to halve the proportion of untreated wastewater, and to substantially increase its recycling and safe reuse globally by 2030.

*The paper, “Global and regional potential of wastewater as water, nutrient, and energy source,” is published by Wiley in Natural Resources Forum, a UN Sustainable Development Journal. Co-authors: Manzoor Qadir, Praem Mehta, UNU-INWEH, Canada; Younggy Kim, McMaster University, Canada; Blanca Jiménez Cisneros, UNAM, Mexico; Pay Drechsel, IWMI, Sri Lanka; Amit Pramanik, Water Research Foundation, USA; Oluwabusola Olaniyan, Winnipeg Water and Waste Department, Canada.

Excerpt: