What Is It?
Over the last 300 years, over 85% of the planet’s wetlands have been lost. Why should we care? Well, meeting drinking water, sanitation, and hygiene targets by 2030 require a 4x increase in the pace of progress. If not, 1.6 billion people will lack safely managed drinking water, which will be a high cause of disease, as will the fact that 1.9 billion people will lack basic hand hygiene facilities.
Water is quite obviously a necessity, but it’s easy to underestimate just how important it is. Everything we do needs water. It’s not just drinking, or washing your hands - it’s eating, it’s cleaning, it’s everything. Everything we can’t live without.
Water shortages are one of those things heavily linked with poverty, in both ways; it causes poverty and is caused by poverty. It is a vicious cycle. Unlike food, another similar issue in terms of linkages with poverty, redistributing the water supply will not necessarily fix the issue, as there isn’t a surplus of water anywhere. Some places, societies, and people indeed have more water than others, but the truth is, the total amount of water is just not enough. The solution lies in the monitoring of water, and the infrastructure water travels through. Sure, this isn’t a palatable response for lots of people, as the “make the best of the resources we have” approach rather than “find new resources” sounds more difficult and threatening. However, it also instigates more action!
How Does It Relate to Sustainability?
This section is very self-explanatory. Water is one of the largest pillars of sustainability, as it bears one of the highest consequences of and on climate change - irresponsible water consumption will cause climate change faster, and climate change causes erosion in the volume of usable water.
Water can be considered in so many different ways. One angle is in terms of ecosystems - not managing water effectively causes extreme marine wildlife erasure, starting with their habitats and ending with the organisms, themselves. I won’t go too in-depth into this, as this I will be covered in the post about UNSDG 14, but marine ecosystems - easily forgotten, as they are out of sight and thus tend to be out of mind - an area important in every aspect of our lives, from food to oxygen, and should be preserved as such.
Water can also be understood from a commercial perspective. Simply put, if we aren’t sustainable, water - usable water, that is - will run out too quickly for us to be able to catch up. We can only last three days without drinking water, and realistically even less without cooking (using water), cleaning (using water), and every other daily task we take for granted. So, it’s quite obviously important that we maintain the water we have on our planet. Sometimes, it’s easy to think about all the oceans in the world and believe that water shortages won’t be a worldwide threat - desalination plants and such will take care of it, right? No. The infrastructure to turn ocean water into useful water is there, sure, in places like Dubai and such, but is impractical on a global scale unless every single dollar of global income is distributed equally amongst all countries. Of course, this won’t happen. So, making use of what we have is very important.
Then there’s the angle of climate change causing water shortages. We’ve all heard of massive droughts in countries we may not have even heard of before - droughts that cause forest fires, that cause death. but the truth is, if things keep going the way they are, we will all become like those case studies of those news reports that we currently can’t relate to. Those struggling people we see on the screen will be us, and it’s a scary thought because as I’ve mentioned previously, water is so important in every single aspect of our lives. However, it’s also a thought that needs to be imbued in everyone’s minds to instigate action. As bad as it is, it’s easy to think that we won’t bear the brunt of it because we live in higher-income places, especially as that’s what’s currently happening - the rich - who have there most influence to mitigate the effects of climate change - are not feeling said effects. However, after a certain point, everyone will feel the effects. Climate change won’t know whether you’re rich or not, because it will spread like wildfire.
What Can You Do?
Clearly, this is an issue. Clearly, this is one problem the scarier topics in the UNSDGs, because it’s the most imminent to us. But that also means there are things we can do.
Don’t Overuse Water
Yeah, yeah, this is very obvious, and a bit boring to read, but it can feel like it won’t make that much of a difference if you take a nice, long shower every day, or if you leave the tap running while you put toothpaste on your brush. The truth is, these things do make a difference. Only 1% of water on Earth is consumable, and every second that you leave the tap running for longer than necessary, you bring that down just a bit more. You might think that the water that you “waste“ simply goes down your sink and back into the pipes, to be recycled, but there are significant and frequent leaks, and high costs to make the water that you just wasted consumable again. Spread the word to your friends and family, too! We can all be sustainable when it comes to water, given the sheer amount of water we come into contact with per day.
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Educate your Educators!
This may be less hands-on than ideal, but knowledge and aid is the way to go here. This is also a chance to remind you that there are different methods of helping - whilst Greenome likes to focus on a more hands-on and practical approach, sometimes we have to understand all the ways of helping out to find the best approach.
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