Austerity cuts to the NHS, public health and social care have killed tens of thousands more people in England than expected, according to the largest study of its kind by the University of York.

Researchers who analysed the joint impact of cuts to healthcare, public health and social care since 2010 found that even in just the following four years the spending squeeze was linked with 57,550 more deaths than would have been expected. The findings, worse than previously thought.

The research also found that a slowdown in life expectancy improvement coincided with the government’s sharp cuts to health and social care funding after David Cameron came to power a decade ago.

“Restrictions on the growth in health and social care expenditure during ‘austerity’ have been associated with tens of thousands more deaths than would have been observed had pre-austerity expenditure growth been sustained,” said Prof Karl Claxton of the Centre for Health Economics at the University of York. “Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that the slowdown in the rate of improvement in life expectancy in England and Wales since 2010 is attributable to spending constraints in the healthcare and social care sectors.”

Researchers said real social care spending rose by 2.2% per capita of the population between 2001-02 and 2009-10, but fell by 1.57% between 2010-11 and 2014-15. The loss of social care funding caused 23,662 additional deaths, according to the findings. Real healthcare spend per capita rose by 3.82% between 2001-02 and 2009-10, but only by 0.41% between 2010-11 and 2014-15. The cuts to healthcare spending between 2010-11 and 2014-15 led to 33,888 extra deaths, the researchers calculated. In total, the study suggested the constraints on health and social care spending during this period of austerity have been associated with 57,550 more deaths up to 2014 than would have been expected if funding had stayed at pre-2010 levels.

David Finch, an assistant director of healthy lives at the Health Foundation thinktank, said the study showed why ministers must put now health at the “front and centre” of their levelling-up agenda.

Even before Covid, he said, there was “an extremely concerning pattern of stalling life expectancy, particularly in the poorest areas of the country”. The pandemic had “since laid bare the tragic consequences of underlying poor health”, he said.

Separate research by Imperial College London, published in the Lancet Public Health journal, found life expectancy in many communities in England was falling even before the pandemic. While life expectancy rose in most places during the first decade of the millennium, from 2010 in some areas it started to decline. By 2014 that deterioration had accelerated, researchers discovered, with life expectancy falling for women in almost one in five communities (18.7%), and for men in one in nine places (11.5%).

Austerity in England linked to more than 50,000 extra deaths in five years | Public sector cuts | The Guardian

 Honduras will choose a new president on November 28.

The current Honduran government headed by President Juan Orlando Hernández does have excellent relations with the United States, despite fraud and violence marking his second-term electoral victory in 2017, an illegal second term but for an improvised constitutional amendment, testimony in a U.S. court naming him as “a key player in Honduras’ drug-trafficking industry” and, lastly, his designation by U.S.  prosecutors as a “co-conspirator” in the trial convicting his brother Tony on drug-trafficking charges.

Some 200 U. S. companies operate in Honduras. The United States accounted for 53% of Honduras’s $7.8 billion export total in 2019. U.S goods, led by petroleum products, made up 42.2 % of Honduran imports.

Honduras’s Economic Development and Employment Zones (ZEDE) reflect planners’ exuberant imagination. They envision privately owned and operated “autonomous cities and special investment districts” attracting foreign investment and welcoming tourist and real estate ventures, industrial parks, commercial and financial services, and mining and forestry activities.

Banks and corporations active in the ZEDEs will appoint administrative officers,  mostly from abroad and many from the United States. They, not Honduras’s government, will devise regulations and arrangements for taxation, courts, policing, education and healthcare for residents.

The first ZEDEs are taking shape now. Meanwhile.

Honduras’s poverty rate is 70%, up from 59.3% in 2019. Of formally employed workers, 70% work intermittently; 82.6% of Honduran workers participate in the informal sector.  A severe drought over five years has decimated staple crops. Nearly half a million Hondurans, many of them small farmers, are struggling to put food on the table. The UN humanitarian affairs agency OCHA reports that as of February 2021, “The severity of acute food insecurity in Honduras has reached unprecedented levels.” The Covid-19 pandemic led to more than 50,000 businesses closing and almost half a million Hondurans losing their jobs. Some 30,000small businesses disappeared in 2020 owing to floods caused by hurricanes. Violence at the hands of criminal gangs, narcotraffickers, and the police is pervasive and usually goes unpunished.  Honduras was Latin America’s third most violent country in 2019 and a year later it registered the region’s third highest murder rate. 

For the sake of survival, many Hondurans follow the path of family and friends: they leave. Among Central American countries, Honduras, followed by Guatemala and Mexico, registered the highest rate of emigration to wherever between 1990 and 2020. The rate increases were: 530%, 293%, and 154%, respectively. Between 2012 and 2019, family groups arriving from Honduras and apprehended at the U.S. border skyrocketed from 513 in 2012 to 188,368 in 2019.

Department of Homeland Security figures show that between 2015 and 2018 the yearly average number of Hondurans apprehended at the border was 63,741. Recently the number has increased – 268,992 Honduran refugees.

Defense spending for 2019 grew by 5.3 %; troop numbers almost doubled. For Hernández, according to one commentator, “militarism has been his right arm for continuing at the head of the executive branch.”  The military forces, like the police, are corrupt, traffic illicit drugs, and are “detrimental” to human rights.

According to Amnesty International, “The government of Hernández has adopted a policy of repression against those who protest in the streets. The use of military forces to control demonstrations across the country has had a deeply concerning toll on human rights.”

The U.S. A. has provided training, supplies, and funding for Honduras’s police and military. Soto Cano, a large U.S. air base in eastern Honduras, periodically receives from 500 to 1500 troops who undertake short-term missions throughout the region, supposedly for humanitarian or drug-war purposes.

US Intervention and Capitalism Have Created a Monster in Honduras – CounterPunch.org

 More than 10,000 production and warehouse workers at 14 John Deere plants in Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Colorado and Georgia walked off the job at midnight, in the latest in a wave of industrial unrest in the US.

The workers, represented by nine locals with the United Auto Workers (UAW), voted 99% in favor of a strike authorization in September after receiving the initial six-year contract proposal from John Deere. 

It is the biggest private sector strike in the US for two years, since the UAW led an action against General Motors. It also comes amid threats of other strikes in the US and widespread labor problems in an economy still recovering form the battering inflicted by the coronavirus pandemic.

On 10 October, workers voted overwhelmingly by 90% to reject the tentative contract agreement offered by John Deere.

David Schmelzer, a quality control inspector at John Deere in Milan, Illinois for 24 years and former chairman of UAW Local 79, said that in 1997 workers took several concessions from John Deere in contract negotiations at the time, which included creating a two-tier system of employees, with workers hired after 1997 receiving fewer benefits.

“We sacrificed, and we want that back now,” said Schmelzer. “Workers in this country need to understand that we have a considerable amount of power in this country, if we choose to utilize it, and there’s no reason why we should stand back and let these companies just completely exploit our labor for billions of dollars and fight tooth and nail not to give us anything.”

John Deere has reported record profits in 2021, with a $4.7bn profit in the first three quarters of this year, compared to their previous record profit year of $3.5bn in 2013. The company spent over $1.7bn on stock buybacks in the first nine months and paid out $761m in dividends to shareholders.

“A lot of what’s been going on in the country over the last couple of years has definitely made people more aware of the disparity between corporate and income inequality. Just massive amounts of corporate greed,” added Schmelzer. “The majority of people want a bigger share of the success of this company, the success that we’ve been a major part of.”

Over 10,000 John Deere workers strike over ‘years’ of poor treatment | US unions | The Guardian

Capitalism is desperate for no-cost solutions to climate change and it is a bonus if it also makes money for investors. Businesses, therefore, advertise their net-zero credentials. sounds great, eh? It is all very simple. Nature holds the solutions to the various environmental crises by creating Protected Areas and increasing carbon sequestration within them (that is, planting trees or restoring forests). A magical solution that does not rely on significant changes by large economies and their major industries, that doesn’t involve burning less fossil fuel and changing our consumption patterns.

The claim is that a third of global climate mitigation can be achieved through Nature-based solutions (NbS).

 It is the usual market-based approach, a re-labelling of what used to be called carbon offsets. “Nature” is considered a capital or an asset, something to put a price on and trade on the stock exchange and financial markets. 

For example,  Shell (one of the big supporters of NbS) is releasing X amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. In order to claim that it’s respecting its climate commitments, Shell can carry on releasing exactly the same amount of CO2, as long as it also supports the creation of a Protected Area that stocks the same amount of CO2, or plants some trees that are supposed to absorb the same amount of CO2. This exchange, of course, is carried out in the financial markets, through the creation of carbon credits. And this is what governments mean by “net zero”: they don’t really intend to reduce their emissions to zero, they will simply claim to “offset” those emissions somewhere else. Transforming nature into a form of capital (in this case, as carbon  ), that can then be sold in the market.

The conservation industry pushes NbS because they can make huge sums selling carbon credits from the Protected Areas they manage in order to fund new Protected Areas (and pay the million-dollar plus salaries of their CEOs).

The most effective known way of pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere is by planting trees. Indeed, according to the 2017 estimates, afforestation accounts for nearly half of the potential for climate mitigation through NbS. But achieving this potential would require planting trees over an estimated area of nearly 700 million hectares, almost the size of Australia. Where is that land going to be found? Certainly not in France or the United Kingdom (among the supporters of NbS). The clear risk is that many indigenous peoples and local communities, among those least responsible for the climate crisis, lose their lands.

The creation of so-called Protected Areas, such as the EU Commission new biodiversity initiative called NaturAfrica,  treats conservation areas as a massive carbon sink, that can “provide interesting opportunities to generate revenue streams for communities through carbon credits”.

Several human rights organizations and independent investigations have shown for years how the creation of Protected Areas, especially in Africa and Asia, are done without the consent of Indigenous or local communities, who lose total access to their ancestral lands, and are accompanied by an increased militarization and violence. Protected Areas destroy the best guardians of the natural world, indigenous peoples, in whose lands are found 80% of biodiversity.

So in the end, Indigenous peoples, small farmers, local communities, fisher-folks, will lose their lands for a climate crisis they didn’t cause. A small price worth paying for if it saves the planet?

Not at all.

First, many of the tree projects claimed as a path to climate mitigation plant fast-growing trees like eucalyptus and acacia, to make money. This can actually increase rather than reduce carbon: existing vegetation has to be cleared and the new plantations are more susceptible to fires. Most such plantations are harvested in a few years to make things like paper and charcoal which quickly return all the captured carbon back to the atmosphere. Real forests of native trees would need to grow for decades before they start absorbing much carbon. Finally, large scale tree plantations destroy biodiversity and indigenous peoples’ lands.

Secondly,  quite apart from the disastrous impact on human diversity, there is no scientific evidence that doubling Protected Areas will actually be good for nature. Of the 20 targets in the previous global action plan on biodiversity, covering 2010-2020, the only one achieved was to increase to 17% the area of Earth designated as Protected Area. Yet biodiversity is said by the conservation industry itself to have declined ever faster during the same period. A 2019 study, looking at more than 12,000 Protected Areas across 152 countries, found that, with some individual exceptions, such conservation reserves have done nothing over the last 15 years to reduce human pressure on wildlife. Indeed, inside many, the pressure had worsened compared to unprotected areas. Many Protected Areas invite mass tourism, and are often home to trophy hunting, logging, and mining operations.

Thirdly and most importantly, the finance industry has never solved any of our problems and won’t do it this time. Leaving it to the market to decide what is important and what is not, according to “economic value” is likely to turn out to be catastrophic. Is an indigenous territory, a forest, a grassland only worthy of protection because of the carbon it stores? What about the people living in that territory and the unquantifiable diversity they represent? It is, precisely, the exploitation of natural resources for profit and the commodification of nature that helped produce the global warming emergency. The finance industry wants to make money, not to protect our planet. 

 NbS are supported and implemented by the largest and most polluting corporations in the world and by the conservation industry, as a way to avoid the drastic changes really needed to tackle climate crisis. Among the supporters of NbS we find: Nestlé, BP, Chevron, Equinor, Total, Shell, Eni, BHP, Dow Chemical Company, Bayer, Boeing, Microsoft, Novartis, Olam, Coca-Cola, Danone, Unilever, etc.

Offset schemes have already failed to prevent climate change. Expanding these schemes massively and re-naming Nature-based Solutions will also fail.

Taken from 

Opinion | Why Nature-Based Solutions Won’t Solve the Climate Crisis—They’ll Just Make Rich People Even Richer | Fiore Longo (commondreams.org)

In July 2018 the attention of The New York Times and then Esquire magazine was somehow drawn to a mountain town in southern Mexico and the truly remarkable amount of Coca-Cola drunk by its residents. The British Broadcasting Corporation has produced a documentary on the same topic.

The town is San Cristobal, in the Central Highlands of Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest and southernmost state. A third of its quarter-million or so residents are of Mayan descent. Their average per capita daily consumption of ‘the friendliest drink on earth’ is a gallon – the whole of a two-liter bottle and most of a second, delivered to numerous local convenience stores from a bottling plant on the town’s outskirts.

Health impacts

Coca-Cola was first marketed in 1886. The name refers to two of the original ingredients – coca leaves, which are the source of cocaine, and kola nuts, which contain caffeine. Both are addictive. Since 1904 the coca leaves used have been not fresh but ‘spent’ – left over after the cocaine extraction process is complete. However, despite claims to the contrary, they still contain traces of cocaine. 

This daily dose of Coca-Cola taken by residents of San Cristobal contains a whole pound of sugar. So it should be no surprise that each year over 3,000 of them die of diabetes. It’s an unpleasant way to die. Typical symptoms are frequent urination, hunger and thirst (despite eating and drinking), fatigue, blurred vision, slow-healing sores, recurrent infections, tingling, pain, or numbness in the hands or feet, sunken eyes, rapid breathing, headache, muscle aches, dehydration, nausea, stomach pain and cramping, vomiting, cerebral edema, and coma. 

Besides diabetes, excessive sugar causes obesity, tooth decay, and fatty liver disease and increases the risk of strokes, heart disease, cancer, and dementia. Researchers who estimated the burden of disease associated with consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) in 2010 found such consumption responsible for 184,000 deaths a year — 133,000 from diabetes, 45,000 from heart disease, 6,500 from cancer.[1] 

These deaths were concentrated in high-income (24%) and especially medium-income (71%) countries. SSBs accounted for the highest proportion of all deaths – 12% — in Mexico, rising to 30% in Mexicans under the age of 45. In 2014 Mexico overtook the United States in per capita SSB consumption. In that year Mexicans drank on average 106 liters of Coca-Cola, Americans 99.5.

Sugar, moreover, is not the only harmful ingredient in Coca-Cola. There is also caffeine, which raises blood pressure and can cause dehydration as well as urinary and respiratory problems. There is phosphoric acid, which like sugar causes tooth decay, slows down digestion, may produce kidney failure or kidney stones, and impedes the absorption of calcium by the bones, leading to osteoporosis. Finally, the caramel used to color the drink is carcinogenic. 

Why do they drink so much Coca-Cola?

Observers talk about ‘addiction’ to Coca-Cola, and it does contain three addictive substances – cocaine, caffeine, and sugar. It is also said that Coca-Cola has become an integral part of the local culture in Chiapas. Many indigenous people believe that Coca-Cola can heal the sick. The BBC documentary features a ‘healer’ sacrificing a chicken to ‘Goddess Maria’ together with an offering of Coca-Cola. 

However, framing the problem in terms of addiction or ‘culture’ gives the impression that it might be solved with the aid of therapy and health education. This is not the case. The residents of San Cristobal have no real choice. Even those fully aware of the ham done to their health by imbibing huge quantities of Coca-Cola have no better alternative. After all, they need to drink water and Coca-Cola does at least contain clean water, drawn from a deep unpolluted aquifer. 

Is clean water available from any other source? Consider possible alternatives.

The town has no wastewater treatment facilities. Untreated sewage goes straight into the waterways. This is the water that comes, now and then, from the faucet, contaminated by E. Coli and other pathogens:

“Symptoms of Shiga toxin-producing E. coli (STEC) infection vary for each person, but often include severe stomach cramps, diarrhea (often bloody), and vomiting. Some people may have a fever, which usually is not very high (less than 101˚F/38.5˚C). Most people get better within 5 to 7 days. Some infections are very mild, but others are severe or even life-threatening.”[2]

What about the water trucks that occasionally pass through your neighborhood? I have information specifically about trucked water in San Cristobal, but here is an assessment of trucked water in Mexico City:

Trucked water is often higher in quality than the city’s notorious tap water, but its quality does vary significantly. Many suppliers simply provide filtered tap water in steel trucks — and others may bring water of such poor quality that it is unsafe to drink.[3]

The situation in poverty-stricken San Cristobal is presumably worse than in the capital.

If water from the faucet and trucked water are not safe options, then why not buy not Coca-Cola but bottled water drawn from the aquifer? And/or other drinks known to contain clean water — milk, fruit juice, beer? 

This would indeed be a sensible thing to do. But Esquire remarks, without further explanation, that bottled water is ‘hard to find.’ So, perhaps, are other clean-water drinks. Perhaps Coca-Cola is the only clean-water drink that is at all widely available in this town? 

In order to show why this may be so, I must go into the commercial aspect of the production and distribution of Coca-Cola in San Cristobal. 

The commercial aspect

The Coca-Cola Company is a US-based multinational corporation. It produces not Coca-Cola but a syrup or paste concentrate that has to be diluted with water to make Coca-Cola. it sells the concentrate to bottling companies that make the Coca-Cola, bottle it, and sell it in various regions of the world to which they have bought exclusive rights.[4] The bottling company that owns the rights to bottle and sell Coca-Cola in Mexico as well as nine other Latin American countries is FEMSA (a Spanish acronym for Mexican Economic Promotions). FEMSA is a Mexico-based multinational beverage and retail company. It is FEMSA that owns and operates the bottling plant in San Cristobal. It also owns retail chains, including OXXO, Mexico’s largest chain of convenience stores.

Here again I have no information specific to San Cristobal, but a plausible reason why bottled water is ‘hard to find’ would be FEMSA’s ownership of the town’s retail stores. If one and the same company were to own the retail stores and the Coca-Cola bottling plant, it would hardly allow its stores to display drinks that would compete with Coca-Cola.

In accordance with an old agreement between FEMSA and the Mexican federal government, the company pays for the water it takes from the aquifer at a very low rate – about 10 cents for every 260 gallons, which comes to $120 per day or $44,000 per year. Even this very modest payment goes to the federal not the local government and cannot be used for local needs. FEMSA offered to build a sewage treatment plant to provide 500 families with clean drinking water, but this token measure was abandoned when the company realized that it would not stop local protests.

Why would the Mexican government allow this situation to continue? It may be recalled that Vicente Fox, the president of Mexico in 2000—2006, was a former chief executive of the Coca-Cola Company in Mexico. This fact suggests the political clout of the Coca-Cola business in Mexico.

A clean-water monopoly

Propagandists for capitalism like to dwell on the wide choice that ‘the market economy’ gives consumers. They forget to mention that this is true only of a competitive market and that most markets are no longer competitive. They are either oligopolistic, with a few big companies that conspire to limit consumer choice, or monopolistic, with a single company in a position to dictate terms to its customers. 

In a place like San Cristobal, a vital human need – clean water – has been turned into a commodity monopolized by a single supplier. This supplier exploits its monopoly position to compel residents to buy clean water from itself and mixed with other substances that destroy their health and doom many of them to an early and miserable death. 

End of the story?

Climate change has brought a sharp and persistent reduction in rainfall to the Central Highlands of Chiapas State. Both surface and deep water sources are undergoing rapid depletion. If this continues for very long, the region will no longer be able to support a large population and most of the people of San Cristobal will join the swelling stream of environmental refugees. At a certain point, whether due to exhaustion of the aquifer or to the falling number of consumers, the making, bottling, and selling of Coca-Cola will cease to be a commercially viable operation. The managers of the plant will depart, well satisfied with the splendid job they have done for the shareholders of FEMSA. 

And so the story will end. Unless?

Notes

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4550496/

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/ecoli/ecoli-symptoms.html

[3]

https://www.koshland-science-museum.org/water/html/en/Distribution/Water-Trucks-in-Mexico.html

[4] A comrade was shown round a Pepsi-Cola bottling plant. When he entered the refrigerated room where the concentrate was stored, the stench was so overwhelming that he had to get out immediately. He felt that otherwise he would collapse. 

Stephen Shenfield

  The International Energy Agency has said in its annual World Energy Outlook carbon emissions would decrease by just 40% by the middle of the century if countries stick to their climate pledges.

That will fall 60% short of their 2050 net zero target.

The IEA’s executive director Fatih Birol explained, “We are witnessing an unsustainable recovery from the pandemic,” he said, pointing to sections of the report that show coal use growing strongly, contributing to the second-largest increase in CO2 emissions in history.

The IEA estimates that 70% of the $4tn investment required to reach net zero must flow into emerging markets and developing economies and for organisations such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to prioritise clean energy projects in those countries, acting as a catalyst for private capital.

Carbon emissions ‘will drop just 40% by 2050 with countries’ current pledges’ | Cop26 | The Guardian

 For many, the threat of annihilation from global nuclear war has been replaced by the global warming crisis and the protestS of the past to eliminate nuclear weapons have all but disappeared. All the nuclear-armed nations are modernising their capacity to wage nuclear war.

According to a report entitled Profiteers of Armageddon: Producers of the next generation of nuclear weapons, authored by William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Program at the Center for International Policy, US decades long “nuclear modernization” plan will cost up to $2 trillion. The U.S.A. is embarking upon a plan to build the next generation of nuclear-armed bombers, missiles, and submarines as well as warheads.

 The modernization plan “ignores the fact that building a new generation of nuclear weapons at this time will make the world a more dangerous place and increase the risk of nuclear war while fueling the new arms race,” Hartung explains.

The U.S. nuclear weapons budget has climbed in recent years to over $43 billion in the Biden administration’s proposed budget for  2022, and warns that “this figure will grow dramatically,” pointing to a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimate that parts of the Pentagon’s plan “will cost tens of billions each over the next decade, including $145 billion for ballistic missile submarines, $82 billion for the new Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), and $53 billion for the new nuclear-armed bomber.”

“And the costs will not end there,” the report continues, noting that “the estimated lifetime cost of building and operating the new ICBM is $264 billion.”

 “A handful of prime contractors” are the initial recipients and main beneficiaries of public money spent on bombers, missiles, and submarines, “the funds trickle down to subcontractors” that often include other prominent companies. The report names firms such as Bechtel, General Dynamics, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon.

From 2012 to 2020, campaign contributions from contractors mentioned in the brief topped $119 million, more than a quarter of which was in the 2020 cycle alone. They also spent $57.9 million on lobbying last year, employing 380 lobbyists, over two-thirds of whom “passed through the ‘revolving door’ from top positions in Congress, the Pentagon, and the Department of Energy to work for nuclear weapons contractors as executives or board members.”

“And it should be noted that the revolving door swings both ways,” the report adds, noting that “three of the past five secretaries of defense worked as lobbyists or board members of major nuclear weapons contractors before taking up their positions in the Pentagon: James Mattis (General Dynamics); Mark Esper (Raytheon); and Lloyd Austin (Raytheon).”

 “It’s long past time that we stopped allowing special interest lobbying and corporate profits stand in the way of a more sensible nuclear policy,” Hartung says.

‘Profiteers of Armageddon’: Report Reveals Who Benefits From US ‘Nuclear Modernization’ Plan (commondreams.org)

 A major survey by the housing charity Shelter has revealed 1.9m households could be suffering physical and mental problems as a result of poor housing conditions as well as uncertainty caused by struggles to pay the rent and repeated evictions.

A quarter of all renters said they were affected by damp and mould and by being unable to heat their homes.

 Almost one in four renters said their housing situation had left them feeling “stressed and anxious” since the start of the pandemic.

“The cost of poor housing is spilling out into overwhelmed GP surgeries, mental health services, and hours lost from work…millions of renters are living in homes that make them sick because they are mouldy, cold, unaffordable and grossly insecure.”” said Shelter’s chief executive, Polly Neate. 

Poor housing harms health of 20% of renters in England, says Shelter | Housing | The Guardian

 About half of the world’s population will suffer from water insecurity by 2050, found The State of Climate Services 2021: Water , a new report from the UN World Meteorological Organization (WMO).



The report said:

“More than 2 billion people are living in countries under water stress and 3.6 billion people face inadequate access to water at least one month per year. Meanwhile, water-related hazards have increased in frequency for the past 20 years. Since 2000, flood-related disasters have increased by 134%, most deaths and economic losses occurred in Asia, where warning systems require strengthening, the number and duration of droughts also increased by 29%, and most deaths were in Africa, again indicating the need for stronger warning systems.”



The report said:



”    In 2018, some 3.6 billion people globally had inadequate access to water for one month per year, which is expected to surpass five billion by 2050.

    In 2020, more than 20% of the world’s river basins had experienced either rapid increases in their surface water area indicative of flooding, a growth in reservoirs and newly inundated land; or rapid declines in surface water area indicating drying up of lakes, reservoirs, wetlands, floodplains and seasonal water bodies. Rapid changes in surface water extent and availability are contributing to elevated disaster risks and potentially negatively affecting water-dependent sectors, e.g. agriculture, energy. More than 80% of wetlands are estimated to have been lost since the pre-industrial era. Despite an average of 58% of countries’ transboundary basin areas having an operational arrangement for water cooperation, only 24 countries reported that all their transboundary basins are covered by such.

    Globally, 56% of household wastewater flows was safely treated in 2020, with regional values ranging from 25 to 80%, indicating that progress remains uneven across the globe. Data from 42 countries reporting on the generation and treatment of total wastewater flows indicate that less than a third received at least some treatment in 2015. The situation is similar for industrial wastewater flows, although here data are only available for 14 countries. In all world regions, and in low-, medium- and high-income countries alike, many water bodies were still in good condition; in 2020, 60% of water bodies assessed in 89 countries had good ambient water quality. However, water quality data are not collected routinely in a majority of countries; especially lower income countries rely on relatively few measurements from relatively few water bodies and lack suitable environmental water quality standards. 

Therefore global status and trends cannot be completely assessed.”