For the majority of people in most of the places?
I’m the girl who talks about toilets at a party. The girl whose infrequent social media posts are uplifting stories about grooms buying their brides toilets in India, harrowing stories about children with only dirty water to drink and socially uncomfortable stories about girls who can’t access pads and tampons when they’re menstruating. These stories happen in all countries, in my country — Australia.
We have a very real and current challenge with the UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 Targets 1 and 2 to provide safe and affordable drinking water and adequate and equitable sanitation and hygiene for all. For all. Not for the majority of people in most of the places, but for every single one of the 7.5 billion people who inhabit this planet.
In Australia, this requires us to reflect not only on how we are helping to achieve this in countries with less resources than ours, but also in our own backyard. There are obvious areas where we are not meeting the SDG 6 targets such as in some remote indigenous communities. There can be issues of water quality leading to poor public health outcomes, inaccessibility of toilets or girls missing school when they are menstruating. We also need to ask whether water is affordable to all people in our cities, whether we have programs in place to ensure people who are socially disadvantaged can still access safe water. If Australia is to meet the SDGs by 2030 we need to engage with remote indigenous communities to understand the values and desires, cultural norms, knowledge and know-how gaps, technology successes and failures, funding and policy shortcomings. We need to prioritise the political support and funding to implement fit-for-purpose and fit-for-place solutions in these communities.
SDG 6 also has targets around improving water quality, protecting and restoring water-related ecosystems, increasing water efficiency, practicing integrated water cycle management and supporting and strengthening local community participation in water management. In the urban context in Australia, the practice of creating water sensitive cities is becoming increasingly accepted and embedded. The concept of water sensitive cities creates a great framework to achieve the SDG targets by protecting the environment, recognising and living within the limits of our resources, and implementing adaptive, multifunctional infrastructure that ensures resilience and considers and promotes people’s engagement in water management. This is a great start and a great framework to work towards achieving SDG 6 in Australia. The challenge from here is to integrate water sensitivity into all of our infrastructure decisions. We need projects with water sensitivity at the core, which are not funded through opportunistic funding, but are standard practice. There needs to be broader understanding of the economics of our project investments and we need policy that supports this move to standard practice. The water sensitive cities framework also provides us with a great foundation of knowledge to share internationally, which is also targeted by SDG 6.
So, what do we need to do to rise to the challenge and make the most of the opportunities to progress the sustainable development goals? We need funding, we need people and we need knowledge. UNLEASH is a meeting of young minds from around the globe. Over 10 days we will have a fantastic opportunity to unpack and expand ideas to ensure we have what we need so that all Australians (and indeed, all people across the globe) can access water, sanitation and hygiene and so that Australia is progressing its approach to water sensitive practices and sharing that knowledge overseas.
