The all-inclusive sustainable development goals: the WASH professional's guide (or should that be ‘nightmare’?)

The sustainable development goals (SDGs) are now upon us. An initial reaction might be ‘too little time, too much to do’. This is, of course, somewhat dangerous as it might lead some professionals, some ministries, and some governments, to decide that nothing (or, at best, not much) can be done − after all, progress towards the sanitation target of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) was weak or very weak in many developing countries (Luh & Bartram 2016). However, we, as WASH professionals, cannot think like this and we have to face the enormity of the SDG challenges head-on. And enormous these challenges most certainly are. SDG #6 is all-water embracing (United Nations General Assembly 2015a, 2015b). It includes, for example, affordable safely-managed water and sanitation, and hygiene (notably facilities for handwashing with soap, menstrual hygiene management (MHM), and food hygiene), for all − and ‘all’ really does mean ‘all’. We therefore have to include the disabled, the elderly, slum dwellers, indigenous peoples and nomads, the homeless including street children and pavement dwellers, and refugees, prisoners and detainees. We also have to address the hygienic disposal of young-child faeces. Water quality has to be improved by reducing pollution, halving the proportion of untreated wastewater, and substantially increasing recycling and safe reuse. This is going to be more than a little difficult, as currently around 1.5 billion (billion = 109) people who are served by sewers do not have any wastewater treatment (Baum et al . 2013); in total some 80% of all wastewater is untreated (Corcoran et al . 2010). Next is water-use efficiency and reducing the number of people suffering from water scarcity. This will also be difficult: currently some 4 billion people live under conditions of severe water scarcity for at least 1 month of the year, …