Ecosystem Services Approach and Nature's Contributions to People (NCP) Help Achieve SDG6

Volume Preface
Access to clean water and sanitation determines the health status of individuals
and society. The right to clean water and sanitation is a fundamental human
right. Consistent with this, SDG6 aims to achieve universal and equitable
access to safe and affordable drinking water for all by 2030. There are some
worrying statistics, which attest the importance of SDG. For instance,
• Around 892 million people in the world have no access to sanitation.
• Approximately 1.1 billion people currently have no access to clean
drinking water.
• Nearly 1,000 children die every day from diarrheal diseases caused by
contaminated water.
• Around 11% of the world's population has no access to an improved
water supply.
Based on these trends, SDG6 also advocates adequate and equitable sanitation and hygiene for all, paying special attention to the needs of women and
girls and people in vulnerable situations. It also points out the need to improve
water quality by reducing pollution, ending the discharge and minimizing the
release of hazardous chemicals and substances by 2030, halving the proportion
of untreated wastewater, and significantly increasing recycling and safe reuse
globally.
Apart from matters related to water quality and sanitation, SDG6 also
specifies the need to substantially increase water-use efficiency in all sectors,
and ensure sustainable abstraction and supply of freshwater to address water
scarcity and significantly reduce the number of people suffering from water
scarcity.
The basis of SDG6 is the need to treat water with the respect it deserves, and
treat water resources with the care needed, so that it is available in the amounts
necessary to ensure human well-being and support economic activities such as
agriculture.
The implementation of SDG6 requires that a number of pre-conditions are
met. The first one is the need to ensure governments regard and treat clean
water as a priority. This is very important since the health of populations
depends on the access to, and the quality of, drinking water. Unfortunately,
in many cases, this important element is overlooked, with negative consequences to public health and to the economy. Second, in order to support the
developing countries which are unable to upgrade their water treatment
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systems, it is important to scale up international cooperation and capacity
building to support developing countries. This is especially needed for projects
and programs on water and sanitation activities, including water collection and
storage, desalination, efficient water use, wastewater treatment, and recycling
and reuse technologies. Third, it is also important to support and strengthen the
participation of local communities in improving water management and
sanitation.
With this volume, we attempt to emphasize and also showcase the advantages of implementing SDG6, and describe some of the ways via which it is
being pursued. We hope that the chapters in this volume will provide a timely
support towards the implementation of SDG6 and help to foster the ongoing
global efforts towards improving the quality of water and sanitation.