Unsafe Water and Sanitation
Billions lack safely managed water or sanitation, driving preventable disease deaths concentrated in children.
Severity score
73.7
Critical · default weighting
Trajectory
Improving
What this is
Roughly 2 billion people lack safely managed drinking water and 3.5 billion lack safely managed sanitation. The result is diarrhoeal disease, cholera, typhoid and parasitic infection, with the mortality burden falling heavily on children under five. Water scarcity is worsening as aquifers deplete and climate change alters rainfall, and water access is an increasing driver of local conflict.
Score breakdown
Each factor is a 0–100 relative severity index, not the raw figure or a specific time period. The actual counts and periods are listed under "Standardized Impact" on the right.
Loss of life
88Direct and attributable mortality, normalised across annual and cumulative tolls.
Lives negatively impacted
94People displaced, injured, food-insecure, exposed or otherwise materially harmed.
Financial cost
60Direct damage, lost output and health-system spend attributable to the event.
Environmental impact
55Emissions, habitat and biodiversity loss, contamination and irreversibility.
Trajectory
35Whether the situation is escalating, and how much worse it is plausibly getting.
Audit trail
Everything this entry has been through — when it was first searched for, queued, reviewed and approved, and how its figures and rank have moved since.
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