About this Discussion

According to the UN, nearly one-third of people globally lack access to safely managed drinking water services, and over half lack access to safely managed sanitation facilities. This lack of access can have potentially significant adverse impacts on people’s health, through water-related diseases, in addition to productivity and environmental impacts. The COVID-19 pandemic has compounded the situation, and has demonstrated the critical importance of sanitation, hygiene and adequate access to clean water for preventing and containing diseases.  

While substantial progress has been made in increasing access to clean drinking water and sanitation, billions of people – mostly in rural areas – still lack these basic services. More needs to be done to improve the situation and achieve one of the Sustainable Development Goals, which calls for ensuring access to water and sanitation for all. The challenge lies in finding a way to use the world’s water more efficiently and make it available to all at a reasonable cost, while leaving sufficient quantities to sustain the environment. Green growth policies in the water sector can address issues of both quantity and quality by encouraging water-related innovation and investment in green infrastructure, and through integration with policies in other relevant sectors.

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Water and Sanitation

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Read how two leading water utilities — Severn Trent in the UK and SA Water in Australia — are using smart sensors to detect blockages

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https://medium.com/mark-and-focus/smart-sewers-down-under-33ebeeac4dd4

***New book out: Regional Water Security provides new research on policy innovations that promote the application of demand management and green infrastructure to achieve regional #watersecurity Available at https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Regional+Water+Security-p-9781119661122

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Evapotranspiration – the transfer of water from the ground into the air through a combination of evaporation and transpiration – increased globally by 10% between 2003 and 2019, according to new research pubished in Nature. This change is found to be driven by the global rise in land surface temperature. This could have implications for water cycle and availability.

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https://www.carbonbrief.org/satellite-data-reveals-impact-of-warming-on-global-water-cycle

Nature-based solutions play a crucial role in achieving water security. Read how New York City utilises nature to protect its unfiltered water supply.

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https://medium.com/mark-and-focus/nature-based-solutions-for-water-security-4b16da3cf061

Climate change has been alarmingly affecting the balance between water and mountains. Especially in the Peruvian Andes, this phenomena has negatively influenced the water regulation capacity of the upper Andean area, thus, affecting the livelihoods of many rural families. This news article recognises the importance of water storage and distribution systems to reduce the potential risks of climate impacts, and to improve the capacity of the ecosystem's water regulation system.

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https://www.iucncongress2020.org/newsroom/all-news/ecosystem-based-adaptation-and-ancestral-culture-...