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Water pollution rises across continents, hundreds of millions at risk

30th August 2016

By: Anine Kilian

Contributing Editor Online

  

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Water pollution has increased significantly across three continents, placing hundreds of millions of people at risk of contracting life-threatening diseases, such as cholera and typhoid, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) warned on Tuesday.

In its latest report titled ‘Snapshot of the World's Water Quality’, UNEP notes that the worrying rise in the pollution of surface waters in Asia, Africa and Latin America also threatens to damage vital sources of food and harm these continents' economies.

UNEP chief scientist Jacqueline McGlade says that the increasing amount of wastewater being dumped into the world’s surface waters is deeply troubling.

"Luckily it is possible to begin restoring rivers that have already been heavily polluted and there is clearly still time to prevent even more rivers from becoming contaminated. It is vital that the world works together to combat this growing menace," she notes.

According to the report, population growth, increased economic activity, the expansion and intensification of agriculture and an increase in the amount of untreated sewage discharged into rivers and lakes are the main reasons behind the troubling rise in surface water pollution in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Pathogen pollution and organic pollution rose in more than 50% of river stretches from 1990 to 2010 on all three continents, while salinity pollution has risen in nearly one-third of river stretches, the UN report finds.

Severe pathogen pollution, the rise of which is largely down to the expansion of sewer systems that discharge untreated wastewater into surface waters, is estimated to affect around a quarter of Latin American river stretches, around 10% to 25% of African river stretches and up to half of Asian river stretches.

About 3.4-million people die each year from diseases associated with pathogens in water, such as cholera, typhoid, infectious hepatitis, polio, cryptosporidiosis, ascariasis and diarrheal diseases. Many of these diseases are owing to the presence of human waste in water.

UNEP estimates that up to 25-million people are at risk of infection from these diseases in Latin America, with up to 164-million at risk in Africa and up to 134-million at risk in Asia.

The solution is not only to build more sewers but also to treat wastewater.

Severe organic pollution, which is caused when large amounts of decomposable organic compounds are released into water bodies, now affects around one out of every seven kilometres of all river stretches in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

The report stipulates that this type of pollution can lead to the complete deoxygenation of water bodies, posing a major threat to freshwater fisheries that provide humans with the sixth-most important source of animal protein and, in developing countries, employ 21-million fishermen and create 38.5-million related jobs.

“There is still time to tackle water pollution. Better water monitoring, especially in developing countries, is needed to understand the scale of the challenge around the world and to identify key hotspots,” notes McGlade.

She adds that, once in-depth assessments have been done, there are a raft of new and old methods that can help reduce the pollution at source, treat polluted water before it enters waterbodies, recycle wastewater for irrigation and protect ecosystems by, for example, restoring wetlands to remove pollutants from urban or agricultural run-off.

"There is no doubt that we have the tools needed to tackle this growing problem, it is now time to use these tools to combat what is slowly becoming one of the greatest threats to human health and development around the world," she says.

Edited by Samantha Herbst
Creamer Media Deputy Editor

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