2011 World Water Day Hosted in Cape Town, South Africa

World Water Day is held on March 22 of every year. The theme this year was “Water for cities: responding to the urban water challenge.” The event consisted of a three-day exhibition and fair held by South Africa’s government.

According to UN’s Rapid Response Assessment Report for World Water Day, Africa is the “fastest urbanizing continent on the planet.” African cities are growing at the fastest rate out of anywhere in the world and as a result of this growth straining the water supplies and compromising sanitation services. The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and UN-Habitat, “Green Hills, Blue Cities” conducted concluded that out of Africa’s one billion people living in urban areas, 40% do not have an adequate supply of water or sanitation services. The statistics show that the number of urban residents without safe drinking water increased from 30 million in 1990 to 55 million in 2008. During that same time span, the number of citizens without reasonable sanitation services doubled to 175 million. The executive director of UN-Habitat, Dr. Joan Clos, said the goal must be to “improve our urban planning and management in order to provide universal access to water and basic services while ensuring our cities become more resilient to the increasing effects of climate change.” Cities in South Africa are believed to face future crises of drought and water shortage due to climate change. There are also concerns over South Africa’s solid waste management and crop irrigation. One example is in Ethiopia’s capital city of Addis Ababa. The city has increased from 100,000 to 3.5 million in the last 50 years. The UN report finds that only five percent of the collected solid waste in Addis Ababa is recycled. The other 95% is mostly left in piles on the ground often near streams and bridges where the trash then makes its way into rivers. Another alarming finding by the report was that 60% of Addis Ababa urban farmers use wastewater to irrigate their crops. This has raised the concern of food poisoning. There are also infrastructure problems. In Kenya’s largest slum, Kibera, 40% of the 20,000 cubic meters of water a day it receives is lost due to leakage or rundown infrastructure.

UNEP’s executive director, Adam Steiner, says these types of concerns are what need to be addressed at the UN Conference on Sustainable Development in 2012. This conference, known as Rio+20, is seen as momentous because it comes 20 years after the conference which “set the environmental agenda for the world”, the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. Rio+20 will focus on green economy, particularly sustainable development and poverty eradication. Mr. Steiner said there is increasing evidence from the green economy indicating, “that a different path in terms of water and sanitation can begin to be realized.”

Recommendations by the report call not for the building of costly water purification systems, but for the protection of watersheds and forests. The report finds, “Cities must reduce water consumption and recycle wastewater inside cities, restore adjacent watersheds and improve engineering solutions to supply water from well-managed ecosystems.” The World will be watching.

-Ashley Harvey, Legal Intern