Data Story 3
2026-04-10
Chapter 1 Introduction
Goal 6 of the United Nation’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals revolves around clean water and sanitation. According to the UN’s website this goal aims to “Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all”(United Nations…2025). In order to more effectively achieve this goal, it is broken down into several more specific sub-goals. These sub-goals focus on different aspects ranging from reducing pollution in water sources, increasing water use efficiency, and protecting aquatic ecosystems such as wetlands (United Nations…2024).
Few statistics give the current picture of SDG goal 6 better than the 2025 World Health Organization finding that a quarter of the global population does not have access to safe drinking water (World W… 2025). This figure indicates that the UN is lagging behind on the road achieve its goal of safe available water for all by the year 2030.
Figure 1.1: Children fill bottled with clean water at a tap stand in Hassansham camp in east of Mosul, Iraq. (Photo: Tegid Cartwright/Oxfam) https://www.oxfam.org/en/what-we-do/issues/water-and-sanitation
Global access to safe water and sanitation is critical not only for allowing for human decent well-being but also for achieving all other Sustainable Development Goals. In a UN conference on water in 2024, the UN’s special envoy on water, Retno Marsudi, described goal 6 as a prerequisite (Water and Sanitation… 2024). With water being the key to life, its no wonder that the proper sustainable management of it is of the utmost importance. In the conference, Marsudi highlighted the requirement of mindful implementation and partnership among all stakeholders in order to get goal 6 back on track. (Water and Sanitation… 2024).
Achieving this SDG would ultimately prevent avoidable suffering and death caused by poor water and sanitation conditions, enabling more people and communities to help steward Earth’s future of sustainable development.