11 ms·

2B people don't have safe drinking water: what does this mean for them?

99 points by surprisetalk 1y ago

koprocezar 1y ago
[flagged]
easternslope 1y ago
[flagged]
the_arun 1y ago
What are the country/world leaders doing to solve this?
- makeitdouble 1y ago
  The "solution" from the perspective of the leading countries: https://themuslimvibe.com/muslim-current-affairs-news/heres-how-nestle-is-leaving-millions-pakistan-nigeria-and-flint-without-clean-water https://themuslimvibe.com/muslim-current-affairs-news/heres-...
  - lclc 1y ago
    That website blames the companies instead of their corrupt governments. It's always easier to blame the evil Westerners than to actually fix the problem. Bad vibe.
    - makeitdouble 1y ago
      It takes two to tango. I'm not disagreeing, but corruption requires a corrupting company as well, and if we're going the moral route, bribing to get the upper hand on a captive population fits the "evil" definition. Then again and again, western countries don't really need a more developed third world, and they won't bend over backward to create more competition for themselves. So supporting corrupt regimes has very few downsides from a G20 country for instance. Banana republics are the most simple example of that, but it doesn't need to be that blatant.
- docdeek 1y ago
  Quite a lot, even if it is a long term project. UNICEF reports that, "Between 2000 and 2022, 2.1 billion people gained access to safely managed drinking water and the number of people lacking at least basic drinking water services decreased from 1.2 billion to 703 million.” [O] That’s not everyone but in about 20 years 2 billion more people got access to safely managed drinking water, and the amount of people who lacked basic drinking water dropped by half a billion in the same time. It won’t mean much to the 700 million who don’t have safe drinking water but progress is being made. 0: https://data.unicef.org/resources/jmp-report-2023/ https://data.unicef.org/resources/jmp-report-2023/
  - hiddencost 1y ago
    Sadly with the end of USAID a lot of this progress will be lost.
    - squigz 1y ago
      I don't think it will be "lost" - and I don't think UNICEF will stop their work even if the US doesn't give them anything; there are still plenty of other governments/organizations donating money
londons_explore 1y ago
We also need to think about uses of water. Water is used for drinking (~2 liters/day)... Contamination here really matters. Waker is used for cooking (~20 liters per day). Contamination here matters somewhat, since some forms of pollutants will be rendered harmless by cooking. Water is used for washing (~200 liters per day). Contamination here matters a little too, because washing water can touch something which gets eaten etc. Water is used for farming (~2000 liters per day/person fed). Contamination here barely matters - but some things can still make it into foodstuffs. Providing small quantities of clean water is far cheaper than providing large amounts.
- kccqzy 1y ago
  I noticed that in some countries tap water isn't safe for drinking but good enough for cooking; and everyone buys large plastic 40lb jugs of water for drinking. How much more cost effective would it be to adopt such a system as opposed to safe drinkable tap water?
  - londons_explore 1y ago
    Non-drinkable tap water is mostly due to water not being available 24x7x365. If a water system is turned off even momentarily, the pressure drops to zero, and sewage and groundwater seep into the water pipes, making it unsafe to drink. Countries with unreliable power grids usually don't have drinkable tap water for that reason. It can also be because the water isn't treated (ie. it is just rainwater in the pipes). Water treatment actually isn't very expensive though - collecting the water and distributing the water are by far the biggest costs.
    - njarboe 1y ago
      In the west water systems are pressurized using a large reservoir and gravity. I imagine its similar in third world countries? They have unreliable water due to the reasons they have unreliable power: poor ability to plan, not enough supply, undersized systems for current use, deferred maintenance, etc.
makeitdouble 1y ago
This a truly big problem that has been going surfaced for decades, and I honestly have become split... On one side, France in particular, but many other "developed" nations as well have stepped in to build the infrastructure and provide clean water to places where it was problematic. Only to monopolize water distribution one way or the other, resulting in people not able to afford the water at the end, while losing their previous precarious access to dirty but natural sources as well. Nestle, Danone are the poster child of these predatory moves. On the other side, there few places poorer countries can turn to. Japan might be one, but they suck at diplomacy. Then there is China, and they need to be willing to dance. And places lacking water tend to lack education and political freedom as well. I'd want to hold higher hopes, but it only ever progresses so slowly, as the incentives are basically stacked against real progress. Has anyone more than small scale feel good stories or "promising advancements". Do we have things that really improved at scale in the last ten or twenty years ?
- ToucanLoucan 1y ago
  > Then there is China, and they need to be willing to dance. They need to dance no matter what, let's be real. Be that for the Chinese government, be that for whichever government, be it hearing out some religious org proselytizing at them, be it enduring stupid and infantilizing designs like those water wells that were powered by a children's spinning playground thing, it really isn't that shocking that these places don't have water still. You basically need to put up with some combination of public relations people who look down on you, celebrities who look down on you, politicians who look down on you, religious folk who look down on you, and all to get a damn well with a filter on it. > Do we have things that really improved at scale in the last ten or twenty years ? There's nothing really to improve. This could be solved in a matter of weeks, if we wanted. But as with most things like this, the solution isn't sexy, it isn't interesting, and unless you monetize it as you describe, it isn't profitable. This isn't a problem silicon valley can solve with an app that's name is a regular word with vowels removed from it, so they don't give a shit. Nestle can't change people for it, so they aren't stepping up. Every charity comes with some or another condescending string attached, even if it's nothing more nefarious than they're going to take selfies or video or whatever with them helping the needy, that's not nothing and it's still denigrating. Wells and filters are not a site of innovation, not really. We know how to build them, but the under-serviced people remain because servicing them won't make money, so nobody cares.
untech 1y ago
I didn’t find this in the article, and am still confused. Do they boil their water? Doesn’t it help with disease? There was one example of the family spending time collecting firewood equal to time collecting water, but boiling was still missing. Also, what about filtering? You can do it with charcoal. I was raised to both filter and boil tap water before drinking. I don’t understand why these aspects are not mentioned when discussing safe drinking water.
- bluGill 1y ago
  > Do they boil their water? Doesn’t it help with disease? Maybe. We need to specify what makes exactly makes some water sample unsafe before we can discuss anything. Sometimes boiling helps, sometimes it makes it worse. If your concern nitrates, lead, arsenic, or other things that won't boil, then boiling just concentrates the contaminates and makes the water worse! If your concern is bacteria boiling will kill the bacteria, but the dead cells are still there which may include some poison in the bacteria. Most filters will not remove the above either. Water is very good at dissolving a lot of nasty things that you don't want in your body (that ability enables a lot of controlled chemistry and thus life as we know it!), and once dissolved it will go through a filter. We again need to know exactly what is in the water before we can discuss if a filter works or not, otherwise we should just assume the filter is not going to make water safe.
  - rtkwe 1y ago
    Most of the time boiling for water purification just means bringing it briefly to a boil to kill pathogens not boiling for an extended period so there's only minimal water loss so very little concentration actually happens.
- ThrowawayR2 1y ago
  IIRC, heating water to the boiling point is hugely fuel intensive and making charcoal is also hugely fuel intensive plus time consuming.
  - Exoristos 1y ago
jp57 1y ago
I'm disappointed that the article conflates together "safe" and "convenient". Out of the 2B who "don't have safe drinking water", About 1.75B have an "improved source", which is a source that "is not free from contamination, [or] is not on the premises, or [is not] always available." Of course we should work toward a world where everyone has clean, highly available water inside the home, but by conflating "unsafe" with "outside the home", the article gives the impression of trying to gin up support by exaggerating the safety problem. On some level, I get it. "2B People Don't Have Safe Running Water Inside Their Homes," is considerably less punchy, even if more accurate.
- atomicnumber3 1y ago
  I can see some amount of counter-argument though. If 95% of your drinking water is clean, but then you were thirsty at 2am and you wouldn't have more clean water until someone went 5 miles up the road to the "improved source" to refill buckets, and so you drank some unclean water that was convenient and you got sick... that's still a big problem. Convenience is a safety feature. The safe option has to also be the convenient option, or people will actively seek out unsafe but convenient options.
  - carlosjobim 1y ago
    Usually you notice a few days before when your stock is starting to run out. If you make coffee every day, would you be surprised that you're out of coffee one morning, or would you notice the day before that you need to buy some coffee?
    - atomicnumber3 1y ago
      My understanding is that these areas are services by a single well or spigot that serves an entire small community. Like in rural (poor) India. So you don't stockpile water for days, you're fetching it daily. But then meanwhile there's also "traditional" (unclean/less clean) water sources available much closer to or in the homes.
- sophacles 1y ago
londons_explore 1y ago
Most of these people are not cut off from the world. You will find a coca-cola bottle in the same village! The solution is to tell them why clean water matters, and provide them a cheap way of making dirty water pretty clean. Ie. a water filter. The cheapest water filters, costing perhaps $10 and able to filter a family drinking water supply for years, will still eliminate most concerning contamination in water. The best water filters - pumped reverse osmosis systems - are still only a few hundred dollars, and will also give a family drinking water for many years. In thailand for example, vending machines exist which cost a few cents to use and will dispense a few liters of filtered water. These help spread the cost of the expensive filter between people and across time.
- orsenthil 1y ago
  > Most of these people are not cut off from the world. You will find a coca-cola bottle in the same village! This! And this has been true for the last 40 years, when more people didn't have access to water. This just shows how a few people care for the rest, and majority fall along. This was with Cola-Cola from 1980s. Today, it is with information. More people have access to bad news via WhatsApp (like Coke) than education (like safe drinking water).
  - BowBun 1y ago
    Great comparison. I'm willing to bet that Coke was happy to watch water scarcity continue to drive more people to drink their products. Likewise modern news organizations care less and less about the quality of the news, and more about engagement which results in junk which manipulates emotions.
    - londons_explore 1y ago
      People going thirsty due to nestle buying it all for bottled water is a western media myth. It's true that plenty of people have water shortages, but those shortages prevent them from watering their crops - there's still plenty everywhere for drinking - which is what nestle is selling too! Bottled water is arguably the best thing in places where water is scarce, because very little is wasted, compared to piped systems where leaks account for far more water than what ends up getting drunk.
sandworm101 1y ago
And how many of these 2B people life in China or India? Such countries that have actively decided to persue manned spaceflight and innumerable other prestige programs ahead of safe drinking water. Rather than doing thier job for them, we should be lobbying for these countries to put thier own people first.
- sofixa 1y ago
  India in particular has a massive government program to bring running and drinking water to a bigger part of its population. Most countries are capable of doing more than one project at a time.
wsdookadr 1y ago
Just invest more in AI and datacenters. Problem solved.
mytailorisrich 1y ago
2 billion people is coincidentally the population growth since 2000. So overall I suspect this means that tremendous progress has been made on safe drinking water.
jenny91 1y ago
Dollar street [1] (linked from the article) by Gapminder is a fascinating resource for learning about what life is really like for many people. [1]: https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street
- 7373737373 1y ago
  In 1994, the photographer Peter Menzel did a project where he photographed families with all their belongings in front of their home: https://www.menzelphoto.com/gallery/Material-World-Family-Portraits/G0000Ip09fSBViW8/C0000d0DI3dBy4mQ https://www.menzelphoto.com/gallery/Material-World-Family-Po...
saddat 1y ago
Makes you wonder where the likely hundreds of billions for third world countries went to ?
pfdietz 1y ago
What happened to dysfunctional nations in the past was they got absorbed into empires or otherwise subjugated. This put a floor on internal dysfunction. Today, there's some combination of factors that prevents this from happening to the same extent. A net good, but there's a downside.
horsh1 1y ago
How many of them have mobile or internet connection?

99 points by surprisetalk 1y ago

koprocezar 1y ago

[flagged]

easternslope 1y ago

[flagged]

the_arun 1y ago

What are the country/world leaders doing to solve this?

makeitdouble 1y ago
The "solution" from the perspective of the leading countries: https://themuslimvibe.com/muslim-current-affairs-news/heres-how-nestle-is-leaving-millions-pakistan-nigeria-and-flint-without-clean-water https://themuslimvibe.com/muslim-current-affairs-news/heres-...
- lclc 1y ago
  That website blames the companies instead of their corrupt governments. It's always easier to blame the evil Westerners than to actually fix the problem. Bad vibe.
  - makeitdouble 1y ago
    It takes two to tango. I'm not disagreeing, but corruption requires a corrupting company as well, and if we're going the moral route, bribing to get the upper hand on a captive population fits the "evil" definition. Then again and again, western countries don't really need a more developed third world, and they won't bend over backward to create more competition for themselves. So supporting corrupt regimes has very few downsides from a G20 country for instance. Banana republics are the most simple example of that, but it doesn't need to be that blatant.
docdeek 1y ago
Quite a lot, even if it is a long term project. UNICEF reports that, "Between 2000 and 2022, 2.1 billion people gained access to safely managed drinking water and the number of people lacking at least basic drinking water services decreased from 1.2 billion to 703 million.” [O] That’s not everyone but in about 20 years 2 billion more people got access to safely managed drinking water, and the amount of people who lacked basic drinking water dropped by half a billion in the same time. It won’t mean much to the 700 million who don’t have safe drinking water but progress is being made. 0: https://data.unicef.org/resources/jmp-report-2023/ https://data.unicef.org/resources/jmp-report-2023/
- hiddencost 1y ago
  Sadly with the end of USAID a lot of this progress will be lost.
  - squigz 1y ago
    I don't think it will be "lost" - and I don't think UNICEF will stop their work even if the US doesn't give them anything; there are still plenty of other governments/organizations donating money

londons_explore 1y ago

We also need to think about uses of water. Water is used for drinking (~2 liters/day)... Contamination here really matters. Waker is used for cooking (~20 liters per day). Contamination here matters somewhat, since some forms of pollutants will be rendered harmless by cooking. Water is used for washing (~200 liters per day). Contamination here matters a little too, because washing water can touch something which gets eaten etc. Water is used for farming (~2000 liters per day/person fed). Contamination here barely matters - but some things can still make it into foodstuffs. Providing small quantities of clean water is far cheaper than providing large amounts.

kccqzy 1y ago
I noticed that in some countries tap water isn't safe for drinking but good enough for cooking; and everyone buys large plastic 40lb jugs of water for drinking. How much more cost effective would it be to adopt such a system as opposed to safe drinkable tap water?
- londons_explore 1y ago
  Non-drinkable tap water is mostly due to water not being available 24x7x365. If a water system is turned off even momentarily, the pressure drops to zero, and sewage and groundwater seep into the water pipes, making it unsafe to drink. Countries with unreliable power grids usually don't have drinkable tap water for that reason. It can also be because the water isn't treated (ie. it is just rainwater in the pipes). Water treatment actually isn't very expensive though - collecting the water and distributing the water are by far the biggest costs.
  - njarboe 1y ago
    In the west water systems are pressurized using a large reservoir and gravity. I imagine its similar in third world countries? They have unreliable water due to the reasons they have unreliable power: poor ability to plan, not enough supply, undersized systems for current use, deferred maintenance, etc.

makeitdouble 1y ago

This a truly big problem that has been going surfaced for decades, and I honestly have become split... On one side, France in particular, but many other "developed" nations as well have stepped in to build the infrastructure and provide clean water to places where it was problematic. Only to monopolize water distribution one way or the other, resulting in people not able to afford the water at the end, while losing their previous precarious access to dirty but natural sources as well. Nestle, Danone are the poster child of these predatory moves. On the other side, there few places poorer countries can turn to. Japan might be one, but they suck at diplomacy. Then there is China, and they need to be willing to dance. And places lacking water tend to lack education and political freedom as well. I'd want to hold higher hopes, but it only ever progresses so slowly, as the incentives are basically stacked against real progress. Has anyone more than small scale feel good stories or "promising advancements". Do we have things that really improved at scale in the last ten or twenty years ?

ToucanLoucan 1y ago
> Then there is China, and they need to be willing to dance. They need to dance no matter what, let's be real. Be that for the Chinese government, be that for whichever government, be it hearing out some religious org proselytizing at them, be it enduring stupid and infantilizing designs like those water wells that were powered by a children's spinning playground thing, it really isn't that shocking that these places don't have water still. You basically need to put up with some combination of public relations people who look down on you, celebrities who look down on you, politicians who look down on you, religious folk who look down on you, and all to get a damn well with a filter on it. > Do we have things that really improved at scale in the last ten or twenty years ? There's nothing really to improve. This could be solved in a matter of weeks, if we wanted. But as with most things like this, the solution isn't sexy, it isn't interesting, and unless you monetize it as you describe, it isn't profitable. This isn't a problem silicon valley can solve with an app that's name is a regular word with vowels removed from it, so they don't give a shit. Nestle can't change people for it, so they aren't stepping up. Every charity comes with some or another condescending string attached, even if it's nothing more nefarious than they're going to take selfies or video or whatever with them helping the needy, that's not nothing and it's still denigrating. Wells and filters are not a site of innovation, not really. We know how to build them, but the under-serviced people remain because servicing them won't make money, so nobody cares.

untech 1y ago

I didn’t find this in the article, and am still confused. Do they boil their water? Doesn’t it help with disease? There was one example of the family spending time collecting firewood equal to time collecting water, but boiling was still missing. Also, what about filtering? You can do it with charcoal. I was raised to both filter and boil tap water before drinking. I don’t understand why these aspects are not mentioned when discussing safe drinking water.

bluGill 1y ago
> Do they boil their water? Doesn’t it help with disease? Maybe. We need to specify what makes exactly makes some water sample unsafe before we can discuss anything. Sometimes boiling helps, sometimes it makes it worse. If your concern nitrates, lead, arsenic, or other things that won't boil, then boiling just concentrates the contaminates and makes the water worse! If your concern is bacteria boiling will kill the bacteria, but the dead cells are still there which may include some poison in the bacteria. Most filters will not remove the above either. Water is very good at dissolving a lot of nasty things that you don't want in your body (that ability enables a lot of controlled chemistry and thus life as we know it!), and once dissolved it will go through a filter. We again need to know exactly what is in the water before we can discuss if a filter works or not, otherwise we should just assume the filter is not going to make water safe.
- rtkwe 1y ago
  Most of the time boiling for water purification just means bringing it briefly to a boil to kill pathogens not boiling for an extended period so there's only minimal water loss so very little concentration actually happens.
ThrowawayR2 1y ago
IIRC, heating water to the boiling point is hugely fuel intensive and making charcoal is also hugely fuel intensive plus time consuming.
- Exoristos 1y ago

jp57 1y ago

I'm disappointed that the article conflates together "safe" and "convenient". Out of the 2B who "don't have safe drinking water", About 1.75B have an "improved source", which is a source that "is not free from contamination, [or] is not on the premises, or [is not] always available." Of course we should work toward a world where everyone has clean, highly available water inside the home, but by conflating "unsafe" with "outside the home", the article gives the impression of trying to gin up support by exaggerating the safety problem. On some level, I get it. "2B People Don't Have Safe Running Water Inside Their Homes," is considerably less punchy, even if more accurate.

atomicnumber3 1y ago
I can see some amount of counter-argument though. If 95% of your drinking water is clean, but then you were thirsty at 2am and you wouldn't have more clean water until someone went 5 miles up the road to the "improved source" to refill buckets, and so you drank some unclean water that was convenient and you got sick... that's still a big problem. Convenience is a safety feature. The safe option has to also be the convenient option, or people will actively seek out unsafe but convenient options.
- carlosjobim 1y ago
  Usually you notice a few days before when your stock is starting to run out. If you make coffee every day, would you be surprised that you're out of coffee one morning, or would you notice the day before that you need to buy some coffee?
  - atomicnumber3 1y ago
    My understanding is that these areas are services by a single well or spigot that serves an entire small community. Like in rural (poor) India. So you don't stockpile water for days, you're fetching it daily. But then meanwhile there's also "traditional" (unclean/less clean) water sources available much closer to or in the homes.
sophacles 1y ago

londons_explore 1y ago

Most of these people are not cut off from the world. You will find a coca-cola bottle in the same village! The solution is to tell them why clean water matters, and provide them a cheap way of making dirty water pretty clean. Ie. a water filter. The cheapest water filters, costing perhaps $10 and able to filter a family drinking water supply for years, will still eliminate most concerning contamination in water. The best water filters - pumped reverse osmosis systems - are still only a few hundred dollars, and will also give a family drinking water for many years. In thailand for example, vending machines exist which cost a few cents to use and will dispense a few liters of filtered water. These help spread the cost of the expensive filter between people and across time.

orsenthil 1y ago
> Most of these people are not cut off from the world. You will find a coca-cola bottle in the same village! This! And this has been true for the last 40 years, when more people didn't have access to water. This just shows how a few people care for the rest, and majority fall along. This was with Cola-Cola from 1980s. Today, it is with information. More people have access to bad news via WhatsApp (like Coke) than education (like safe drinking water).
- BowBun 1y ago
  Great comparison. I'm willing to bet that Coke was happy to watch water scarcity continue to drive more people to drink their products. Likewise modern news organizations care less and less about the quality of the news, and more about engagement which results in junk which manipulates emotions.
  - londons_explore 1y ago
    People going thirsty due to nestle buying it all for bottled water is a western media myth. It's true that plenty of people have water shortages, but those shortages prevent them from watering their crops - there's still plenty everywhere for drinking - which is what nestle is selling too! Bottled water is arguably the best thing in places where water is scarce, because very little is wasted, compared to piped systems where leaks account for far more water than what ends up getting drunk.

sandworm101 1y ago

And how many of these 2B people life in China or India? Such countries that have actively decided to persue manned spaceflight and innumerable other prestige programs ahead of safe drinking water. Rather than doing thier job for them, we should be lobbying for these countries to put thier own people first.

sofixa 1y ago
India in particular has a massive government program to bring running and drinking water to a bigger part of its population. Most countries are capable of doing more than one project at a time.

wsdookadr 1y ago

Just invest more in AI and datacenters. Problem solved.

mytailorisrich 1y ago

2 billion people is coincidentally the population growth since 2000. So overall I suspect this means that tremendous progress has been made on safe drinking water.

jenny91 1y ago

Dollar street [1] (linked from the article) by Gapminder is a fascinating resource for learning about what life is really like for many people. [1]: https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street

7373737373 1y ago
In 1994, the photographer Peter Menzel did a project where he photographed families with all their belongings in front of their home: https://www.menzelphoto.com/gallery/Material-World-Family-Portraits/G0000Ip09fSBViW8/C0000d0DI3dBy4mQ https://www.menzelphoto.com/gallery/Material-World-Family-Po...

saddat 1y ago

Makes you wonder where the likely hundreds of billions for third world countries went to ?

pfdietz 1y ago

What happened to dysfunctional nations in the past was they got absorbed into empires or otherwise subjugated. This put a floor on internal dysfunction. Today, there's some combination of factors that prevents this from happening to the same extent. A net good, but there's a downside.

horsh1 1y ago

How many of them have mobile or internet connection?