More than 4 billion people may not have access to clean water
The new estimate is more than double the official count
By Claire Yuan
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.