Drinking water quality and the SDGs
Robert Bain, Rick Johnston, Tom Slaymaker
Abstract
Access to safe drinking water is recognized as a human right and has long been a goal of national and international policy. The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) include ambitious global targets for drinking water, sanitation and hygiene. The indicator for SDG target 6.1, use of safely managed drinking water services (SMDW), seeks to address the limitations of previous monitoring efforts 1 . SMDW services are defined as improved sources of drinking water (piped water, protected groundwater sources, rainwater collection and packaged or delivered water) that are accessible on premises, available when needed and free from contamination 2 . For global reporting on drinking water quality the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) for Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene focuses on the major priorities from a public health perspective: faecal contamination as indicated by detection of Escherichia coli , and elevated levels of arsenic and fluoride. While these three key parameters are the focus of SDG monitoring at global level, WHO’s Guidelines for Drinking Water Quality 3 provide the normative framework that underpins national standards in many countries and cover a far wider range of water quality parameters. The latest estimates from the JMP find that around 2 billion people lack SMDW, the majority in Central and South Asia (768 million) and Sub-Saharan Africa (747 million) and demonstrate that contamination of drinking water is often the limiting factor for SMDW 4 . Despite an increase from 96 to 117 countries with SMDW estimates between the 2017 and 2019 JMP reports, a large number of UN Member States are still unable to report on SMDW, often due to a lack of nationally-representative data on water quality.