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The report, titled "Sick Water," said that 3.7 percent of all deaths are linked to diseases that stem from 2 billion tons of contaminated water discharged daily across the world, including fertilizer runoff, sewage and industrial waste. More than half of the world's hospital beds are occupied by patients sick with water-related diseases, which will translate to millions of deaths, the report said.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the casualties are preventable if world leaders focus more on clean drinking water and wastewater management.
Ajit Solanki, AP
A United Nations report released Monday said dirty water kills more people each year than war. Here, a man looks for reusable items in the polluted water of the Sabarmati River in Ahmadabad, India, this weekend.
"These deaths are an affront to our common humanity and undermine the efforts of many countries to achieve their development potential," Ban said in a statement. "The world has the know-how to solve these challenges and become better stewards of our water resources."
Ban said clean drinking water is a key element in enabling the U.N. to achieve its goals, including "improved maternal and child health and life expectancy, women's empowerment, food security, sustainable development and climate change adaptation and mitigation."
It takes three liters of water to produce one liter of bottled water, and that bottled water in the U.S. requires the consumption of some 17 million barrels of oil annually, according to the report.
Fast-growing urban populations threaten to further increase the amount of wastewater flowing worldwide, but the U.N. is focusing on potential solutions, including multimillion-dollar water recycling systems and further exploration of natural purification systems found in wetlands and salt marshes. Improved wastewater management in Europe may be used as a model for future development.
Achim Steiner, the U.N. undersecretary-general and executive director of the U.N. Environmental Program, said that while the new report's figures are "stark," there is hope for improvement in the world's clean drinking water.
"If the world is to thrive, let alone to survive on a planet of 6 billion people heading to over 9 billion by 2050, we need to get collectively smarter and more intelligent about how we manage waste, including wastewaters," Steiner said. "Pollution from wastewater is quite literally killing people."
