from the I-would-like-to-be-able-to-drink-to-that dept.
New research has found that in 15 major cities in the global south, almost half of all households lack access to piped utility water, affecting more than 50 million people. Access is lowest in the cities of sub-Saharan Africa, where only 22% of households receive piped water.
The research also found that of those households that did have access, the majority received intermittent service. In the city of Karachi in Pakistan, the city's population of 15 million people received an average piped water supply of only three days a week, for less than three hours.
These new findings add to data from the World Resources Institute's (WRI) Aqueduct tool, which recently found that by 2030, 45 cities with populations over 3 million could experience high water stress. The research, detailed in the Unaffordable and Undrinkable: Rethinking Urban Water Access in the Global South report shows that even in some places where water sources are available, water is not reaching many residents. Some cities, like Dar es Salaam, have relatively abundant supplies, yet daily access to clean, reliable and affordable water continues to be problematic for many residents.
"Decades of increasing the private sector's role in water provision has not adequately improved access, especially for the urban under-served," said Diana Mitlin, lead author, professor of global urbanism at The Global Development Institute at The University of Manchester. "Water is a human right and a social good, and cities need to prioritize it as such."
Analysis in the report showed that alternatives to piped water, like buying from private providers that truck water in from elsewhere, can cost up to 25% of monthly household income and is 52 times more expensive than public tap water.
Global indicators used for the Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals have largely underestimated this urban water crisis because they do not take into account affordability, intermittency or quality of water. UNICEF and the World Health Organization reported in 2015 that more than 90% of the world's population used improved drinking water sources. But "improved" encompasses such a wide variety of sources, such as public taps, boreholes or wells that it fails to reflect the reality for individuals and families in today's rapidly growing cities.
The question of whether water is affordable is not measured and while efforts have been made to increase water coverage, public authorities have paid little attention to affordability issues.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 15 2019, @05:40PM (3 children)
Shitholes can't get their shit together to make basic utilities to work? Well they are shitholes after all...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 15 2019, @06:20PM
Not surprised by this predictable skreed. I guess some people just like dragging the world down with their miserly, uh, "observations."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday August 15 2019, @07:34PM (1 child)
Said shitholes including certain private developments like the trailer park my in-laws retired to. Base water fee: $50 per month, usage fee on the order of $25 per thousand gallons. They under-built the source and sewage treatment plant, nobody wants to pony up the one-time fee to do the upgrade, so instead they're encouraging people to piss out the window to save water so the old plant can limp along for a few more years, and hoping that the increased fees might some day pay for the upgrade (current projections look like: somewhere between 20 years and never before the project is funded by usage fees...)
Water supply and treatment by central systems is fabulously expensive, if you're not paying for it with sales tax, property tax, or other "invisible" money that people don't get irate about paying.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Thursday August 15 2019, @11:50PM
The caveat of the "20 year" plan is that by the time they collect the money and interest in 20 years to pay for it at today's guesstimate, the new guesstimate will be 6 times higher...
A place I lived in during high school had a similar problem and plan, 40 years on, it's still 20 years in the future. Sort of like AI and Nuclear Fusion power plants.
So yeah, never becomes the honest answer.
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday August 15 2019, @05:47PM (2 children)
I live in the US, Florida, in a major urban center less than a mile from an interstate onramp, and I get my water from a well on the property - as do my neighbors, and many cities in Florida, including the south half of Miami. Florida has a limestone caprock around 200' down and under that cap is relatively clean and safe drinking water (if you give it a few hours to outgas the hydrogen sulfide...)
"Good water" doesn't have to come from a fluoridated, chlorinated, regulated, municipal source traveling down miles of dilapidated rusted out old pipes. In fact, the last neighborhood we lived in had municipal water, and periodic problems with contamination which were being monitored by the city and treated by various methods for years, none of which involved actually digging up the leaking supply pipe and fixing it.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 15 2019, @07:26PM (1 child)
Municipal water supplies shouldn't be fluoridated. It's the equivalent of 'poisoning the well'.
How to steal a city: Montes v. City of Yakima - https://www.aclu-wa.org/cases/montes-v-city-yakima-0 [aclu-wa.org]
How to steal a state budget: McCleary, et al. v. State of Washington - Supreme Court Case Number 84362-7: https://www.courts.wa.gov/appellate_trial_courts/supremecourt/?fa=supremecourt.mccleary_education [wa.gov]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday August 15 2019, @07:37PM
Oblig. [youtube.com]
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DannyB on Thursday August 15 2019, @05:52PM (1 child)
I can turn on my tap, and an apparently unlimited source of clean drinkable water comes out.
Maybe a problem we have in the developed world is that we have this illusion.
While we have a right to peacefully assemble, we do not yet have a right to repair.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Thursday August 15 2019, @06:41PM
The Hawthorne aquifer is a good educational tool for that, at least in the elevations where it _almost_ pumps itself out of the ground.
Our house water comes from a well in the Hawthorne. When the aquifer is sufficiently supplied and not over-pumped, which is still most of the time, we don't need to turn on the submersible pump, our holding tank will fill - albeit slowly - from the natural pressure of water entering the aquifer at higher elevations than our wellhead.
When there is drought, or over-pumping (for instance: in orange country, the groves will pull hard on the Hawthorne in preparation for, during and after a freeze event - this will transform a nearby well from briskly flowing with +3' of head to one that needs pumping with -10' of head) you can actually see the effects in the water that's supplying your home.
Unless you just switch on the submersible pump and leave it going 24-7, like most people do. Then it's all magic water until the hurricane comes through and kills the electricity.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 2, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Thursday August 15 2019, @06:16PM (1 child)
It's just plain old corruption. Most people are in favor of it if they think they'll get preferential treatment.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Thursday August 15 2019, @08:34PM
Indeed. Heard of a central African city, perhaps in Uganda, that received new industrial capacity water pumps through charity, allowing them to supply thousands of homes. Within a week, some thieves tore the pumps out.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 15 2019, @07:33PM
"Decades of increasing the private sector's role in water provision has not adequately improved access, especially for the urban under-served,"
I'm shocked!, shocked! that private companies focus on profit instead of societal good.
Oops!, I misspelled that. I meant, no shit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 16 2019, @12:05AM
Karachi [wikipedia.org]: 24°51′36″N 67°0′36″E - part of "global south."
Canberra [wikipedia.org]: 35°17′35″S 149°07′37″E - part of "global north."
Obvious that they're actively trying to prevent people from thinking clearly about the situation.
(Score: 2) by EJ on Friday August 16 2019, @03:24AM (1 child)
This is one of the problems with overpopulation that people don't think about. Some naive person posted in the anti-natalist thread that everyone on the planet could fit inside Texas. That's great. Let's make a giant cemetery the size of Texas to bury everyone in because you won't be able to get food and water to those people.
The other issue with overpopulation is that quality is much more important than quantity of life. Life in a city like New York is the worst kind of torture. A person needs at least an acre of land to live a comfortable life on this planet. We aren't supposed to live in concrete tombs, and clean drinking water is not an infinite resource.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday August 16 2019, @05:08AM
Because nobody can figure out things like transportation, logistics, etc.
How much volume is an acre?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday August 16 2019, @12:15PM
How many of those cities ever had it better by that metric? In other words, this is probably the best that infrastructure has ever been, but we get spin like this:
And that's the problem with "human rights" as presented here. Just because you have feelz that something should be a right, doesn't mean your society has the infrastructure to make that happen. And what does the private sector have to do with this problem anyway? These societies could have realized that statement above and provided reliable piped water to the household any time in the past few millennia, right? Not just in the past few decades.