Access to safe water and sanitation for all is one of the world's toughest challenges. Globally, 1.2 billion people still lack access to safe drinking water, and 2.6 billion go without sanitation.

As this year's World Water Day approaches, many observers are focusing on the increasing stresses facing fragile water supplies worldwide and what this means for attempts to improve water supplies to the world's taps and toilets.

Sanitation - the focus of this year's World Water Day - is an area where the world is failing massively, according to an article on Australia's ABC News website.

Only 30 percent of people worldwide are connected to a public sewerage system, and one child dies as a result of poor sanitation every 20 seconds from preventable diseases such as diarrhoea or cholera, according to U.N. estimates.

The site points to novel new schemes for tackling sanitation problems. In Kenya there are plans to build an artificial wetland at a jail in Mombassa. It would process the sewage of 4,000 inmates that currently flows untreated into a creek, according to ABC.

But sanitation is a growing problem. Worldwide, 5 billion people are expected to be without a connection to public sewerage by 2030 - that's 1.1 billion more people than in 2000, the news website says.

In Zimbabwe, inadequate sanitation is causing serious problems in the country's second biggest city, Bulawayo. The streets are currently engulfed by sewage, affecting two million people, according to IRIN, the news website of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Financial problems are stopping local authorities from maintaining public sanitation systems, resulting in burst sewers and sewage spilling onto the streets from manholes after pipes become blocked.

City resident Ingrid Mayobodo was so afraid that her two children would contract communicable water-borne diseases from the overflow that she sent them to live with her sister in another suburb.

"I could not stand them playing 'hop-skip-and-jump' over pools of sewage effluent to get into the house from the street," she told IRIN. Last year, the city's unsanitary conditions led to a cholera outbreak, and there are fears this may happen again.

SCARCITY RISING

So if the problem's so bad, why isn't more being done?

One of the biggest problems for sanitation and safe water access is the worsening global water crisis.

Areas of water scarcity and stress are predicted to expand over the next two decades, making it even harder to get water to those who need them most, according to global news agency Reuters.

Currently, 44 percent of the world's population live in areas affected by high water stress. That figure is likely to rise to 47 percent by 2030 because of factors like global warming and population increase. In Africa, up to 250 million people may suffer more water stress by 2020.

Though the exact effects of global warming are difficult to predict, water supplies and climatic changes are deeply linked, Achim Steiner, the U.N.'s Environment Programme executive director, says in Kenya's Business Daily newspaper.

"But even without climate change, we already have a water crisis in many parts of the world based on decades of perhaps overly simplistic views of the root problems and solutions," he writes.

It's a myth that Africa doesn't have enough water, Steiner writes. In fact, Kenya has enough rainfall to meet the needs of six to seven times its population. The problem is that much of this water is never collected either in reservoirs or in natural wetland ecosystems, over half of which have been lost.

With climate change putting increasing pressure on water resources, more must be done to collect and use water more efficiently and fairly, Steiner says.

CONFLICT LOOMING

Just as it's clear that climate change and human mismanagement will impact negatively on the world's water resources, it is also clear what the effects will be, according to the South Korean news website Ohmynews. Increased competition for supplies will lead to increased global tensions conflict over water, the news website says.

"Throughout the world water supplies are running dry and the situation is being compounded by inappropriate management of water resources that will likely unravel previous international cooperation around water."

With a third of the world's people said to be short of water, social problems and violence are a serious threat as water becomes scarcer. "Potential social and political division and unrest over access to water will hit marginalized populations in developing countries hard," the site writes.

International cooperation over water must increase if the threat of conflict is to be averted, the website says.

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