The Water Challenge: Global North and Global South

A recurrent issue in the drinking water management of countries in the Global South is the lack of cooperation between stakeholders, gaps of knowledge in policy documents, ineffective enforcement strategies and finally low quality data collection on surface and groundwater condition. Linked to the disconnection of different scales to bring awareness at grass root level implementation, water pollution remains a growing challenge in need of intersectional collaboration to achieve a comprehensive management system (Awoke 2016, Ongley 1994). In order to tackle such problem statement recurrent in the Global South, an interesting application is given by the self-governance of water pollution as a common. Specifically through the individual treatment of rural water pollution (ITRWP), positive health impacts have been reported on the populations. To achieve an equitable health outcome regardless of socioeconomic status, policy alignment must be coordinated at all scales: the government must provide technical and financial support to ensure sustainability of the governance and actions (Yaping  2022). Moreover, certain rules must be set in place to create a synergy among communities and ensure that under a structure of self-governance the collective commons, such as water, are managed in cooperation with the neighbouring and impacted groups (Yaping  2022).


Water accessibility has always been the main topic with regard to the global water crisis. To this regard, it is only recently that policy makers started to focus on water quality as an additional factor influencing the health and environmental risks posed by water mismanagement. To this regard, water bodies present in urban centres of developed countries face the same challenges as those in developing countries from contamination of new and unknown pollutants (Asit 2019). Nowadays, in developed countries especially we're presented with the financial and technical resources to provide adequate quality water access to the full population and it is a matter of deploying the appropriate political will to improve the water management system (Asit 2019). 


Globally, at least four billion people do not have access to safe drinking water (Asit 2019). 

In the developing world, fewer than 10% of all people have access to wastewater collection and treatment (Asit 2019). 

The Global Burden of Disease study (GBD 2015 Risk Factors Collaborators 2016) estimated that, in 2015, 1,800,000 people died from diseases related to water pollution. 

The number of dead zones in the world’s coastal oceans has increased almost exponentially, from 49 in the 1960s to 405 in 2008, covering 245,000 km2 (Diaz & Rosenberg 2008).


Overall, water contamination challenges are not limited to developing countries but are an issue across all populations. The heterogeneity of regulations and ways to assess water quality present uncertain conditions to be able to confirm the health and safety of water across certain regions. Moreover, with an increasing GDP as well the number of pollutants and related chemicals grow thus resulting in higher contamination risks (Damania 2019).


References:


Awoke, A., Beyene, A., Kloos, H. et al. (2016), River Water Pollution Status and Water Policy Scenario in Ethiopia: Raising Awareness for Better Implementation in Developing Countries, Environmental Management 58, 694–706 

Ongley, E.D. (1994), Global water pollution: challenges and opportunities, in ΑIntegrated Measures to Overcome Barriers to Minimizing Harmful Fluxes From Land to Water≅, Proceedings of the Third Stockholm Water Symposium, Sweden, 3, 23-30

Yaping Luo, Jianxian Wu, Ying Xu, (2022), Can self-governance tackle the water commons? — Causal evidence of the effect of rural water pollution treatment on farmers' health in China, Ecological Economics, Volume 198

Damania, Richard; Desbureaux, Sébastien; Rodella, Aude-Sophie; Russ, Jason; Zaveri, Esha. (2019), Quality Unknown: The Invisible Water Crisis, Washington, DC: World Bank

Asit K. Biswas & Cecilia Tortajada (2019) Water quality management: a globally neglected issue, International Journal of Water Resources Development, 35:6, 913-916

Diaz, R. J., & Rosenberg, R. (2008), Spreading dead zones and consequences for marine ecosystems, Science, 321(5891), 926–929

GBD 2015 Risk Factors Collaborators (2016), Global, regional, and national comparative risk assessment of 79 behavioural, environmental and occupational, and metabolic risks or clusters of risks, 1990–2015: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2015, Lancet, 388 (10053), 1659–1724


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