Access to clean water is the most basic human right of all. That means the competition for water with a burgeoning human population is a threat to our wider security. And our present levels of global pollution are a collective crime against nature and a betrayal of our duty to conserve our natural environment for the generations to come after us.
Any society can only achieve good rates of public health, economic productivity, gender equity, educational attainment and a host of other desirable outcomes when all its members enjoy their rights to water and sanitation. Water, in all its aspects, is crucial to the safe and effective functioning of the world in which we live.
The discussion over the unacceptable discharge of untreated water into our rivers takes us back (perhaps guiltily) to one of the proudest achievements in our own history. During the first half of the 19th century, London’s population was ballooning and the capital’s booming economy also meant that an ever-greater amount of additional waste from factories and slaughterhouses heaped pressure upon a failing system. The scorching summer of 1858 brought things to a crisis as the river levels dropped to such a low level that raw effluent from the city sewers lay on the riverbanks.
It was the beginning of what became known as “the Great Stink”. Charles Dickens wrote, “I can certify that the offensive smells, even in that short whiff, have been of a most head and stomach-distending nature.” The recently rebuilt Houses of Parliament received the full force of the river’s foulness. New legislation allowed the Metropolitan Board of Works to borrow £3 million, which was to be repaid from a threepenny levy on every London household over the following 40 years (not a million miles in principle away from what Thames Water appears to want today). It is arguable that this one project did more to save lives than any other, dramatically improving sanitary conditions in the capital and striking a huge blow against waterborne diseases.
But today, dreadful though they are, we must keep the problems of Britain’s water pollution in perspective. The Danube, for example, has high levels of chemical, particularly pharmaceutical, waste and extremely high levels of farming pesticides, and there has been increasing scrutiny of the role Serbia plays in the pollution of Europe’s second-longest river. About a third of Belgrade, Serbia’s capital city of 1.6 million, has no connection to drainage systems and relies instead on septic tanks that are emptied straight into the river. The rest of the population spew their unprocessed waste into the waterway through about 100 sewage drains. In all, this is over 13,000 times the unacceptable volume of wastewater dumped into the Thames last year.
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This one example is part of a wider horror story about how the human population is trashing global waters. Perhaps the most shameful fact is that 80 per cent of the sewage produced globally makes its way into the world’s oceans untreated. This can be deadly for delicate marine habitats, like seagrass beds and coral reefs. When healthy, these habitats act as carbon sinks, produce oxygen and allow marine flora and fauna to develop and thrive.
In 2021 a global study by geographers at Columbia University used a new high-resolution geospatial model to measure and map nitrogen and faecal indicator organisms from human sewage in watersheds around the world — areas of land that channel rainfall, snowmelt and runoff into a river. The researchers found that just 25 watersheds — out of 135,000 — contributed nearly half of all wastewater nitrogen, but that 58 per cent of coral reefs and 88 per cent of seagrass beds were exposed to it.
Along with the Danube, the watersheds that carry the most pollution to the ocean include the Yangtze, the Nile, the Mississippi and the Parana in South America, which ultimately empties into the Atlantic. It indicates the global nature of the problem resulting from the activities of large and small, rich and poor countries alike.
This is all before we come to one of our greatest horrors — the scourge of plastics. The facts on plastic pollution are shocking. At the present rate of accumulation, plastic is expected to outweigh all the fish in the sea by 2050. In the first decade of the 21st century, we made more plastic than had been made in the whole of history up to that point, and there are now somewhere between 15 and 50 trillion pieces in the world’s oceans. There is nowhere on the planet that is plastic-free. Microplastics have now even been found in Antarctic snow.
Four countries — China, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam — dump more plastic into the sea than all other countries combined. Of those, China is by far the worst culprit. Of the 60 million tonnes of plastic waste produced in China every year, only about 16 million tonnes are recycled, and the Yangtze River pours more plastic into the world’s oceans than any other.
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Our precious marine life is hugely threatened by plastic, which can entangle it, suffocate it or block its digestive tracts. Seabirds and turtles have been found with bottle tops in their stomachs, and countless numbers have died from respiratory obstruction or plastic ingestion. Fish in the North Pacific are estimated to ingest between 12,000 and 24,000 tonnes of plastic each year and studies suggest that a quarter of all the fish sold at California markets contain plastic in their guts.
Yet only two of the UN’s 17 goals for sustainable development mention water at all. Goal 14 is to “conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development”. Targets for 2025 will be missed by a considerable distance. Goal 6 is: “By 2030, achieve universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all.” This prerequisite for health and human wellbeing, as well as economic and social development, comes — bizarrely, in my view — behind other goals such as education and gender equality.
Those of us who are fortunate enough, despite the recent lapses by UK water companies, should seek to ensure that everyone is able to benefit from the advantages that we take for granted. Pushing the case for clean water and worldwide agreements on the pollution of our oceans is a global crusade that we, as a country, should champion with relish. It is an issue that must be put above the pettiness of our domestic politics. It is time to lift up the level of our national discourse, shift our time frames and recognise the irreversible nature of the damage we, as a species, are inflicting on our precious blue world.
The Coming Storm: Why Water Will Write the 21st Century, by Dr Liam Fox, is published by Biteback on May 7, priced £20