Untreated sewage threatens seas, coastal population - Risks

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) called for Governments to back wastewater emission targets as a key step towards cleaning up the world's seas and reducing the number of people at risk of disease because of lack of access to basic sanitation services.

One way of dealing with the problem is to "set realistic but ambitious wastewater emission targets", UNEP Executive Director Klaus Toepfer said, stressing that they should be "linked to a timetable when the targets should be met". Doing this, he added, would "allow us to tackle this scourge once and for all, so that current and future generations can have access to safe healthy, drinking water and enjoy coastal areas free from contaminated bathing waters and polluted natural resources".

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According to a UNEP report published on 3 October 2002, almost 40 per cent of world population lives in coastal areas less than 60 kilometres from the shore, most of which are being threatened by untreated sewage discharges. The report was compiled in response to a target agreed upon at the World Summit on Sustainable Development, held in Johannesburg, South Africa, to halve by the year 2015 the number of people without access to basic sanitation services.

The most vulnerable populations are in the South Asian seas region, where 800 million people live without access to basic sanitation services, putting them at high risk of sewage-related disease and death. The next most at risk region is East Asia, where 515 million people or some 25 per cent of the world's "unserved population" live.

The report also noted that rising populations are overwhelming whatever improvements are made to the sanitation systems of the developing world. In the South Asian seas region, for instance, between 1990 and 2000, 220 million people benefited from improved access to sanitation. But during the decade the population grew by 222 million, offsetting that advantage and leaving 825 million still without access to acceptable sanitation.

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