Urban water supply and sanitation

node · earth · Global

The oldest urban system and still the one that decides most outcomes. The WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme's 2025 report, covering 2000–2024, records global safely managed drinking water rising from 68 to 74 per cent between 2015 and 2024 while urban coverage stayed flat at about 83 per cent, and safely managed sanitation rising from 48 to 58 per cent globally with urban coverage moving from 59 to 66 per cent. The flat urban water line is the finding worth sitting with: cities connected very large numbers of new people and their coverage share did not move, because they were connecting them at roughly the rate the urban population grew. Globally about 2.1 billion people still lack safely managed drinking water and about 3.4 billion lack safely managed sanitation. Sanitation is the harder half in practice, because the "safely managed" test includes what happens to the waste after the toilet — collection, transport and treatment — and that is the part that requires a network, a utility and a budget rather than a household investment.