UNESCO: Imminent Risk of Global Water Crisis

Between two and three billion people in the world suffer from drinking water shortages. These shortcomings will be exacerbated in the coming decades, especially in the world’s major population centers, unless international cooperation in this sector is strengthened.

This is the warning UNESCO has issued to the world’s most industrialized countries. UNESCO is an educational, scientific, and cultural organization of the United Nations, established in Paris on November 4, 1946. UNESCO was born out of a shared awareness that political and economic agreements are not enough to build lasting peace and that it must be based on education, science, and culture, cooperation among nations to ensure universal respect for justice, law, human rights, and fundamental freedoms, which the Charter of the United Nations recognizes for all peoples without distinction of race, sex, language, or religion.

UNESCO estimates that more than 2 billion people, or 26% of the world’s population, do not have safe access to drinking water sources, and 3.6 billion of the world’s inhabitants (46%) do not have access to safe hygiene services.

Moreover, between two and three billion people suffer from a lack of clean water for at least one month per year, posing a serious risk to their livelihoods, particularly food security. The world’s water-stressed urban population is expected to double from the current 960 million to 1.7-2.4 billion by 2050. Countries in Africa and the South will be particularly hard hit. The increasing frequency of extreme and prolonged droughts is also putting ecosystems to the test, with a range of catastrophic consequences for plant and animal species.

There is an urgent need to establish reliable and long-term international mechanisms to prevent the global water crisis from spiraling out of control. “Water is our common future, and it is essential that we act together to share it equitably and manage it sustainably,” the UNESCO experts emphasized.