13 ENSURE AVAILABILITY AND SUSTAINABLE MANAGEMENT OF WATER AND SANITATION FOR ALL
Water, water everywhere? Well, not quite. Improving access to clean drinking water, sanitation and hygienic facilities needs to be addressed for a large portion of our world. This goal not only focuses on human consumption of water, but the quality and sustainability of water resources worldwide. This goal addresses access to water, managing our impact on water sources, protecting our ecosystems and supporting our communities to improve sanitation management.
Learning Objectives
- Learners will understand the causes, effects and consequences of water pollution and water scarcity around the world.
- Learners will understand unequal water distribution and the lack of access to safe drinking water and sanitation facilities.
- Learners will gain an understanding of integrated water resource management and other strategies for ensuring the availability and sustainable management of water, sanitation and natural-disaster management.
- Learners will communicate and participate in strategies and activities that help reduce and prevent water pollution, ensure water access and implement water saving measures.
- Learners will be able to question socio-economic differences and gender disparities in the access to safe drinking water and sanitation.
- Learners will be able to contribute to water resource management and reduce their water footprint at the local level
Essential Questions
Media (Identification of Value/Biases):
How are water issues reported in the media? What angle do you think is important to focus on?
Environment
What are the main water sources in your community?
What are the biggest challenges to water quality and quantity? What are the biggest threats to our world’s water sources?
Poverty, wealth and power
How is access to clean water a poverty issue? Locally? Nationally? Internationally?
Indigenous Peoples
What are the challenges for Indigenous People regarding access to safe and clean water? How are individuals and communities taking a stand?
Oppression and genocide
How has control over water been used as a tool of oppression? How have people resisted this oppression?
Health and biotechnology
What technologies have helped ensure access to water?
How have these advances helped efforts to get clean water?
Gender politics
How is access, or lack of access, to water and sanitation a gendered issue?
Social justice and human rights
How are people around the world exercising their right to water?
Peace and conflict
How do people get clean water in times of conflict? What might some barriers be? What environmental impacts to water are caused by conflict?
Overview of The Goal
Around the world, there are about 844 million people who don’t have access to clean water.
This means that people (usually women and girls) spend hours each day finding water sources. Without clean water, entire communities are in danger of illness or death from disease, dehydration, and poisoning
Learning Activities
Lesson Plans: The Water Project
They have organized the Teacher’s Guide into four easy to use sections. You can preview each lesson below and then download the guide.
https://thewaterproject.org/resources/lesson-plans/
Handouts: Water from The Water Projects
How access to clean water is related to other SDG’s.
https://thewaterproject.org/resources/twp-handouts.pdf
Lesson Plans: The Nature Conservatory: Finding your Flow: Watersheds
Students will use a video about water in Colombia as a jumping off point to explore the issues facing the watershed in which they live and to identify ways they can become involved in protecting their water along its journey.
Lesson Plans: UNESCO Education for Sustainable Development in Action Learning & Training Tools
Learning about water: multiple-perspective approaches
This is an excellent resource with lesson plans for learning about this SDG goal from multiple-perspective approaches. There are a number of lesson plans. “Complex issues related to water sustainability entail geographic, political, scientific, cultural, economic and social factors. By its very nature, teaching for water sustainability requires that multiple perspectives be applied when searching for solutions or good practices in water management. Individual students who have experienced a multiple-perspective approach have more opportunities to establish a sense of place, both in their local and global communities. Through local action and understanding the perspectives of others, students can better know themselves.
https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000215432
Lesson Plans: Water and sanitation toolkit.
This resource includes a number of handouts that are printable. It includes research and activities. The statistics are from Canada, but it could be a good activity to convert and research comparable statistics from the United States.
https://plancanada.ca/file/plan-for-change/water-toolkit2016.pdf
Further Research and Activities:
https://en.unesco.org/themes/education/sdgs/material/06
Assessment and Reflection:
Reflection Journal
- Describe the learning activities (articles, videos, etc.) and your experience – What did you do/hear/see?
- Interpret and evaluate the events from your perspective – What do I think about it now? How does it relate to other things that I know?
- Explain your experience; reveal your new insights, connections with other learning, your hypotheses, and your conclusions.
- Reflect on how this information will be useful to you – What questions do I have? Have I changed how I think about the situation? Where do I go from here?
- What did you particularly value and why?
- Is there anything you would do in the next unit? What have you learned? What will you do with these lessons?
Renewable Assignment Options
Understand your impact. Be careful what you throw down the drain or in the toilet—it all ends up in our oceans, rivers, and lakes—nobody wants to be swimming in your leftover paints or fertilizers.
Use water wisely. Read this list of more than a hundred ways to conserve water from Water – Use It Wisely. Challenge yourself and your community to try these practices and see the difference one person can make.
Shorten those showers. We all have a part to play in using less water. Start by taking shorter showers. Make yourself a playlist of songs that is about six minutes long—when the music stops, time to get out of the shower. Turn off the tap between brushes and conserve water by reducing unnecessary flushing.
Get active and get vocal. Learn about water scarcity and water pollution issues in your community and explore how water insecurity, privatization, or pollution are impacting your community. Identify what needs to change and who you can ask to help change that. Talk to your representatives and leaders and let them know you care about water. Join a cause like World Water Day or World Toilet Day and make some waves.
Talk about it. Sanitation might be taboo or make people sheepish, but it is also important to break down the stigma, particularly for girls and women. Challenge people and help spread awareness about how water access affects everyone uniquely, yet is a fundamental right.
Get informed. Understand the impacts of large corporations on water sources around the globe. Learn more about divestment efforts in your region and take a stand!
Participate in a water walk fundraiser awareness campaign. For a period of time, track how much water you use and how long it takes you to get it. Or, put a policy in place where water must be filtered or
