Water and Sanitation in the World's Cities: Local action for global goals

The world’s governments have agreed to Millennium Development Goals, including the target of halving by 2015 the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation. Water and Sanitation in the World’s Cities is a comprehensive and authoritative assessment of the urban challenge implicit in this target, and how it can be addressed. IIED’s Human Settlements Programme prepared this report for the United Nations Human Settlements Programme. It sets out in detail the scale of inadequate provision of water and sanitation and describes the impacts on health and economic performance, showing the potential gains of remedial action. It analyses the proximate and underlying causes of poor provision and identifies information gaps affecting resource allocation. It outlines the consequences of further deterioration, and it explains how resources and institutional capacities - public, private and community - can be used to deliver proper services through integrated water resource management.