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2030 SDGs

A new portal aims to improve water quality through better data

Access to clean water is one of the greatest challenges the world faces, with a quarter of the world’s population using unsafe drinking water and half of humanity – 3.6 billion people – living without safely managed sanitation. And one key – and often overlooked – element in the battle to address this challenge is data. As the recent United Nations Water Conference and the launch of the Water Action Agenda highlighted, without more comprehensive, better quality data, policymakers cannot accurately measure progress on the state of our world’s water and water bodies or prioritize interventions.

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is the custodian for three Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 indicators that help understand and prioritize the state of water bodies, including 6.3.2 (“Proportion of bodies of water with good ambient water quality”).

To measure this, a new SDG Water Quality Hub was launched at the end of April to facilitate the UN’s broader 2023 Data Drive. The hub allows countries to view and compare the latest water quality data regionally and globally in order to prioritize action.

We asked Stuart Warner, a UNEP expert on country-based information for such data, to tell us more about the hub.

Read the full interview on UNEP’s website

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UNEP-DHI Centre

UNEP-DHI Centre on Water and Environment

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