Urban Water - Towards health and Sustainability

AFTER THE UN Commission for Sustainable Development called for a comprehensive assessment of the freshwater resources of the world in 1994, this paper was commissioned and presented by the Steering Committee to the Commission and the UN General Assembly Special Session in June 1997. In the introduction, the authors argue that although "health" and "sustainability" in urban centres are ideal goals, the conflicts that arise between the practical processes create a situation where these two concepts must be kept distinct so that their interrelated nature can be discussed. They contextualize water in relation to sustainability and health within historical and present problems and discuss the unhealthy yet sustainable urban water systems.

Section II concentrates on water and urban health, reviewing the "sanitary revolution" of the nineteenth century, the nature of water-related diseases that still afflict the most disadvantaged urban dwellers, and the relationship between water, poverty and illness. They stress that the tendency to focus on simple threats, such as contaminated drinking water, has obscured a broader ignorance. They acknowledge the limits of scientific guidance and argue that more efficient finance and infrastructure alone is not sufficient to achieve health and sustainability in urban centres. Instead, a number of both scientific and institutional issues need to be resolved before the "brown" agenda can be called an "easy" agenda.

Section III concentrates on the issues of water and sustainability. The authors trace the levels of urban growth since the industrial revolution and the shortfall in infrastructure that have occurred. The burden of urban water supply and management has been displaced from the urban environment to other ecosystems. This urban encroachment on life support systems outside the urban centre is historically contextualized, as is the role of centralized systems in perpetuating the displacement of pollution. The relationship between water, wealth and sustainability is also explored.

In Section IV, having illustrated that "trade-offs" exist between the attainment of health and sustainability, the authors argue that improvements in water management which build on a better understanding of the physical and institutional aspects of water systems can minimize the extent to which health must be traded for sustainability, and vice versa. They present paths through which the simultaneous achievement of these two goals are possible and discuss the problems that already exist or may emerge including "demand management" processes as opposed to "productionist logic", i.e. the targeting of water wastage rather than usage, the affordability of water tariffs and the importance of water connections. The authors suggest a holistic approach to urban water problems, with the integration of efforts by the state, the private sector and the voluntary sector, by way of community efforts and well-coordinated and informed policy strategies.

The final conclusions outline the common themes and issues that run through the various sections, namely that health and sustainability are two major challenges for urban water politics; that if they are pursued narrowly the two goals can conflict due to the complex web of physical, social, economic and political interrelationships, and can create trade-offs between the interests of future generations and today's poor. The need for a better understanding of the interrelated nature of the problems is also acknowledged, as is the challenge that science faces in increasing the understanding of water-related threats to health and sustainability, and that politics faces in building on accurate understandings of these problems.