Water Sanitation in the World's Cities

The world's governments agreed at the Millennium Summit to halve the number of people, mainly in the world's cities, who lack access to safe water and adequate sanitation by 2015: an immense challenge. This is an assessment of the problems and how they can be addressed.;The report sets out in detail the scale of inadequate provision of water and sanitation; it describes the impacts on health and economic performance, showing the potential gains of remedial action; it analyses the proximate and underlying causes of poor provision and identifies information gaps affecting resource allocation; it outlines the consequences of further deterioration; and it explains how resources and institutional capacities - public, private and community - can be used to deliver proper services through integrated water resource management.