Goal 7: ensure environmental sustainability
Goal 7: ensure environmental sustainability
Goal 7 is threefold and seeks to: 1) integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programs, reversing the loss of environmental resources; 2) reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water; and 3) achieve significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020.
In our world today:
- Forests are disappearing at the rate of 200sq. km a day. That's equivalent to losing forest cover the size of a soccer pitch every 2 seconds and the size of Panama every year. This deforestation is displacing indigenous peoples from their native homes and uprooting their livelihoods.
- Over 2.4 billion people lack access to proper sanitation facilities and one billion lack access to drinkable water – this leads to malnutrition, diarrhoea and high mortality rates.
- Around 2 million children die every year from preventable infections spread by dirty water or improper sanitation facilities.
Progress on Goal 7:
- The world is on track to meet the drinking water target, but disparities persist between urban and rural dwellers.
Photo by Jozsef Szoke/Hungary
In Peru, WUSC is known as SUM Canadá (Servicio Universitario Mundial del Canadá). Its water and sanitation project has improved the health and living conditions for over 1.25 million people. Among other results: residents of 183 shantytowns communities and 132 rural villages have access, or improved access, to water and sewer services; the project’s knowledge, lessons and best practices disseminated through 110 volumes of project diagnostics, studies and publications now found in the National Library of Peru and 7 municipal libraries; $22.8 million in funding from CIDA over the past 25 years leveraged almost two-fold for a total project value of CA $49 million.
