“By 2030, the health and livelihoods of 4.8 billion people could be at risk if current water quality monitoring is not improved.”
UN-Water has just released “Progress on Ambient Water Quality – Mid-term status of SDG Indicator 6.3.2 and acceleration needs, with a special focus on Health”. The report was prepared by UNEP GEMS/Water and provides an update on the global status and trends in ambient water quality, based on data reported by 120 Member States during the 2023 Data Drive.
SDG indicator 6.3.2 assesses the proportion of a country`s water bodies (rivers, lakes and aquifers) having good ambient water quality, taking into account data on conductivity, acidification, nitrogen, phosphorus and oxygen. For more information, see our projects page and the SDG 6.3.2 Water Quality Hub.
The bad news is that only 56% of all monitored water bodies worldwide were classified as having good ambient water quality. This represents a 4% decrease compared to the 2020 results. The right hand map gives a global overview with the most recent national indicator score.
More worringly, only 3% of all data used to report on indicator 6.3.2 was provided by the poorer half of UN member states. This situation was more or less consistent across all three data drives, highlighting the continuing challenges of monitoring and reporting water quality in many developing countries. Based on current global population projections, the health and livelihoods of 4.8 billion people could be at risk by 2030 if this situation is not improved.
Although the current status is worrying there is still enough time to turn the tide, but this will require major efforts to improve data availability and move towards restoration of water bodies.
Capacity development is one of GEMS/Water’s core mandates and we have promoted the use of citizen science data as an approach to fill monitoring gaps. For the 2023 indicator submission, Sierra Leone and Zambia combined their national data on water quality monitoring with citizen science data – the first time this was achieved for any SDG 6 indicator.
More pilot studies on the application of citizen science data are already underway and we are also working on facilitating the implementation of earth observation data in the reporting process for indicator 6.3.2 to further decrease monitoring gaps.
