Sustainable Development Goal: Clean Water and Sanitation — #6
I am sure that many of you have heard of UN’s Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs for short. Today I am going to be diving deeper into SDG #6. Clean Water and Sanitation
So what does this SDG mean, it is basically a goal that the entire human population can have clean water and have proper sanitation by the year 2030.
This goal has many targets or steps along the way that must be taken. Each target is 6. what ever number that target is. There is Safe Drinking Water for all, Sanitation for All. Better Water Quality, More efficient water use, Integrated water management and Healthier Ecosystems.
To reach these goals, international cooperation is needed as well as local participation. They are sort of prerequisites.
Why is Clean Water and Sanitation important? Don’t we already have it?
Well, the truth is that some places have clean water while others don’t. Take Canada for example. Many places within that country have clean drinking water but certain reserves don’t. Justin Trudeau has worked on cutting down the number and it has significantly dropped from well over 100 to just above 50.
In other countries around the world, people need to boil their water before they can drink it, when you boil the water, it kills microorganisms and bacteria that can eventually cause diseases. This is useful but the fact that these countries don’t have the clean water to drink without boiling it isn’t good. Plus on a hot and sweltering day, I am not sure that warm water is your drink of choice.
With the clean water problem, brings us to another target in this SDG: More Efficient Water Use.
Once you have the clean water, what exactly are you using it for. You need to be able to use it efficiently and get the most out of it as possible. If not then that clean water that was wasted could be used for something else.
Now Sanitation. Sanitation includes basic things that have become more important than ever, such as washing your hands (You should do that any way.) and cleaning yourself thoroughly. Than there are basic things such as brushing your teeth and showering. But the problem comes when people don’t have the resources to do these basic tasks.
As you can see, in the image above. The water is very dirty and isn’t fit for drinking and can make you ill. Since this is a problem in many different countries around the world, there needs to be a solution to this problem.
This goal is very important because at the rate humanity is going, by the year 2050, 1 out of every 4 people will not have clean drinking water and that is a major concern. We need to be working on this problem immediately.
With all that is currently going on in the world, with the pandemic and vaccines, we still need to concentrate on major problems such as this one. Just because there is a pandemic doesn’t mean that everything else goes away.
Many people are working on finding a solution to this problem and have had varying degrees of success, one company created the LIFE straw which filters water through a straw.
So I believe that we can create versions of this that are even bigger and can filter the water before it even goes into the straw, like a filtered cup.
Thanks for reading and I hope you learned something new about Sustainable Development Goal Number 6.
