United Nations Human Development Report 2006:
‘Beyond Scarcity: Power, Poverty and the Global Water Crisis’

Access to water and sanitation extends opportunities, enhances dignity and helps create a virtuous cycle of improving health and rising wealth. The report highlights poverty, unequal access, wars, migration and unsustainable consumption patterns as the main contributors of the water crisis. It puts forward the important message that we are in the midst of a crisis in water and sanitation that overwhelmingly affects the poor. A crisis, in which too many people do not have access to enough water under the right conditions to live.

•One in every six human beings has no access to clean water within a kilometer of their homes.

• Ensuring that every person has access to at least 20 liters of clean water each day is a minimum requirement for respecting the human right to water.

•Some 1.8 million child deaths occur each year as a result of diarrhea — 4,900 deaths each day or an under-five population equivalent in size to that for London and New York combined.

•Together, unclean water and poor sanitation are the world’s second biggest killer of children.

•Almost two in three people lacking access to clean water and more than 660 million people without sanitation live on less than $2 a day.

•Unclean water and poor sanitation have claimed more lives over the past century than any other cause.