UN Confuses Patting Itself on the Back with Kicking its Own Ass
Serious doubts are being raised over a UN claim that the world has halved the number of people without clean drinking water, meeting a target set in the UN Millennium Development Goals three years early.
The progress was hailed in New York by UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon as “a great achievement for the people of the world”. But experts contacted by New Scientist said the target had been weakened since it was agreed at the UN General Assembly in 2000.
The original promise was to “halve, by 2015, the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water”.
However, most developing countries don’t measure if water is safe to drink. The World Health Organization and UNICEF - which have monitored the target - instead decided to judge water as “safe” simply by looking for evidence of “improved sources” such as piped supplies, boreholes and collected rainwater - and this, even UN officials admit, undermines the goal.
In a report accompanying this week’s announcement, UN authorities say that “some of these sources may not be adequately maintained and may not actually provide safe drinking water. As a result, it is likely that the number of people using safe water supplies has been over-estimated.” In other words, the target has probably not been met.
So it’s still an urgent problem on which little progress has been made.