Home » Health & Wellness  » Environment and hygiene  » Water for all Over the next 25 years, 95 percent of urban population growth will take place in developing countries.

The urban population will roughly double in size, to nearly 3.5 billion people. By 2015, one of five people will live in cities with populations of over 10 million, as compared to one of nine, now. There are 19 ten million-plus mega cities (15 in the developing world), and even more challenging perhaps is that 411 cities around the world have more than one million people. These will grow to 564 by 2015. Most sobering, of the world population that will live in cities, about half will be poor.

The growth rates of mega cities with more than 5 million people will decline, but the number of people being added to these cities will accelerate as growth is added to an already large population. In most of Latin America and Asia, the big cities will spread geographically into a network of cities that traverses the countryside and many counties will begin to resemble the Northeast corridor of the United States.

After 2020 population growth in developing world will occur mainly in urban areas, as rural populations decline. By the middle of the 21st century, villages will cease to exist in many countries, and poverty will have been transferred to urban areas.

Data from many developing country cities show that the substantial progress in improving water and sanitation in recent decades is now being reversed. In Asia, people in mega cities do not have superior access to potable water and private toilets than people in smaller towns and villages. In Africa, residents of the many rapidly growing small cities have worse water and sanitation conditions than people in the countryside.

Without increased investment in water and sanitation, city waste and pollution levels will multiply and affect the countryside. Potable water supplies will diminish, and urban infrastructure will decay under the strain of population pressure. Future water and sanitation policies and strategies will increasingly need to be directed to urban areas, and particularly to peri-urban areas and satellite towns where the poorest urban residents live.

There are three stages of integrated water planning and management, namely:

mobilization
distribution
sanitation and waste management

The four deadly sins of current water management regimes are:

One, the pretence that the current system will - eventually - meet the needs of all users. Most water systems are centralized and depend on public investment and central government transfers of resources.

Two, ignoring Demand Management. Cities can stop a good deal of the current wastage of water due to over-consumption and leakage. This could go a long way towards meeting the needs of the unserved. Leakages from main conveyance systems, excesses in house consumption, especially toilet facilities, landscape, park and garden irrigation, and excessive industrial consumption are all affecting the quantity of water available to urban residents.

Three, failure to involve the societyin addressing the problems of the informal community. CBOs and NGO s and the private sector may well be crucial ingredients for success. How do we find the political will to try alternative? What measures are there to stimulate organizations to make their own local application of a particular proven strategy?

Four, failure to solve the central government-local government jurisdictional issue. Where central governments do not allow municipal authorities to tax or borrow and yet they are held responsible for services - it is a recipe for non-delivery.

Strategies advocated by the World Water Commission include.

Holistic, systematic approaches based on integrated water resource management;
Participatory institutional mechanisms;
Full-cost pricing of water services, with targets
Institutional, technological, and financial innovation;
Effective, transparent and enabling regulatory frameworks for private action;
Getting more precise figures for water quality and quantity;
Identifying financial resources and investment needs;
Installing adequate incentives to make the investment happen.

The technical means are available to bring about the necessary reversal of current trends but the solution lies in fundamental changes in approach and much higher levels of investment.

(by Margaret Catley-Carlson: member of the World Water Commission)
From: 'Countdown to Istanbul. World Water Day Issue. 2000. Volume 6. No.3'