More than 4 billion people may not have access to clean water

Access to clean water is a human right — one that half of the world may not have.

Out of the roughly 8 billion people on Earth, more than 4.4 billion lack access to safely managed drinking water, researchers report August 15 in Science. The estimate, based on computer simulations of data from low- and middle-income countries, is more than double the figure calculated by the World Health Organization (SN: 8/16/18).

“The number of people whose basic human right to safe drinking water is not being met may therefore be significantly underestimated,” says environmental microbiologist Esther Greenwood of Eawag, an aquatic research institute in Dübendorf, Switzerland.

→ Continue reading at Science News

More from author

Related posts

Advertisment

Latest posts

The asteroid that may have killed the dinosaurs came from beyond Jupiter

Earth’s most famous killer asteroid came from the outer reaches of the solar system, researchers report in the Aug. 16 Science. About 66 million...

Mortgage rates are way below their peak. Americans are swooping in | CNN Business

Washington CNN  —  The standard, 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 6.49% this week, up slightly from the prior week’s level,...

Elon Musk’s AI photo tool is generating realistic, fake images of Trump, Harris and Biden | CNN Business

New York CNN  —  Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok on Tuesday began allowing users to create AI-generated images from...