What The Attempts To Clean The Seine Reveal About Water Pollution Worldwide
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Paris’s efforts highlight the difficulty cities face in cleaning waterways to preserve human, animal and ecosystem health.
“Proper diagnosis is imperative to plan and prioritize investments for pollution control and health risk mitigation,” says International Water Management Institute (IWMI) senior researcher and CGIAR One Health expert Javier Mateo-Sagasta. He emphasizes the importance of targeted strategies, especially in low- and middle-income countries, where the impact of water pollution on health is most severe. By reducing contamination from sources like livestock and aquaculture, initiatives like the CGIAR Initiative on One Health aim to curb the spread of harmful pathogens, protecting vulnerable communities and improving overall water safety.
Assessing the issue
Monitoring and modelling water pollution is essential for effective assessment and planning. Water quality monitoring tracks the levels of certain pathogens, like E. coli and salmonella, and their antibiotic-resistant strains in surface waters. This helps everyone from public health inspectors and researchers to community members to understand where and when these pathogens are present, gather data to improve models that predict how these contaminants move and change in watersheds and assess health risks from activities like drinking, bathing, and irrigation.
However, significant data gaps severely limit these efforts, especially in developing countries. According to recent reports published by UN-Water and the UN Environment Programme, the poorest half of the world contributes less than 3% of global water quality data points, providing only 4,500 lake quality measurements out of nearly 250,000. While existing data already show freshwater quality declining since 2017, the lack of data in many regions suggests the situation could be even worse where information is sparse. If these gaps persist, by 2030, more than half of the global population will live in countries without sufficient water quality data to guide management decisions for issues like droughts, floods, wastewater effluents and agricultural runoff.
While the testing of the Seine was conducted by Paris Olympic officials, communities can also take part in this crucial step. In Ethiopia, One Health trained the Addis Ababa Water and Sewerage Authority to identify waterborne microbial hazards quickly and affordably. This training enabled IWMI researchers to publish findings revealing that 20% of the fecal bacteria had antibiotic-resistant traits, and that these hazards were highest in the dry season when river water is used for irrigation.
IWMI has also been working on incorporating community members into monitoring processes through citizen science and the release of miniSASS, an AI-powered app which allows communities to assess the health of rivers by photographing water sources. The AI identifies pollution indicators, collecting critical data on the extent and impact of wastewater contamination, empowering local communities with nmental monitoring skills.