According to the World Health Organization, as of 2022, 18.9% of the world’s urban population did not have access to safely managed drinking water. This is only a slight decrease from 19.5% in 2000. Safely managed drinking water is defined as being accessible on premises, available when needed and free from contamination.
However, analysis of data from 15 cities in developing countries show that on average, almost half of all households still lacked access to safe and reliable piped utility water, suggesting that global datasets overestimate the state of water access in these cities and do not take water quality or intermittency of water availability into account. Households that are not connected must rely on self-provision or private water vendors, which can be up to 50 times more expensive than public water.
Sustainable Development Goal 6 aims to ensure access to water and sanitation for all by 2030. In order to reach this target by 2030, progress in urban areas needs to be made more than 10 times faster than recent trends. However, it will become increasingly difficult for cities and water utilities to provide water in urban areas due to climate change — over 650 million people in over 500 cities are expected to see at least a 10% decline in freshwater availability by 2050.