Seen from the sky: polluted waters around the world
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About 4 billion people experience severe water shortages for at least one month a year and around 1.6 billion people - almost a quarter of the world's population - have problems accessing a clean, safe water supply, according to the United Nations.
While the UN's Sustainable Development Goals call for water and sanitation for all by 2030, the world body says water scarcity is increasing and more than half the world's population will be living in water-stressed regions by 2050.
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"NGOs like to have their photographs taken with a shiny new hand pump ... then they walk away and it's handed over to communities to raise the funds to maintain these systems, to make sure that they're repaired. And if they're not?" she said.
"The research indicates at any one time one third of hand pumps across Sub-Saharan Africa are broken."
Drainage system waterways around densely-populated Mexico City, like the Interceptor Poniente, are heavily polluted with sewage and trash from nearby communities. Access to reliable water services is limited in low-income areas. Mexico has one of the lowest shares of its population connected to public wastewater treatment plants in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, according to the agency.
A University of Manchester report in 2018 found that the River Tame near Denton in Britain had 'the worst' level of micro-plastic pollution ever recorded anywhere in the world at that time.
One of the legacy promises of the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro was the cleanup of Guanabara Bay. After four years, the situation has worsened, according to data from state environmental institute Inea. The environmental degradation of the water bodies in metropolitan Rio is putting at both local ecosystems and public health at risk, says Brazilian biologist Mario Moscatelli.
Two barges sailed up and down a vast stretch of floating trash on the Potpecko artificial lake in Serbia, collecting tons of garbage that almost clogged the dam that crosses it. The river Lim which fills the lake is swollen by melting snows and, according to activists, it has carried in more than 20,000 cubic meters of plastics from unregulated dumps along its banks in Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia. As the garbage also threatened the functioning of a hydroelectric plant, authorities in Belgrade ordered an immediate clean-up. The operators collect up to 100 cubic meters of plastic and other trash daily and take it to a landfill about 80 km (50 miles) away.
A drain pipe feeds into the Euphrates River carrying sewage, near Najaf, Iraq.
Pisang Batu river, on the outskirt of Jakarta, made national headlines in 2019 after plastic garbage and organic waste from nearby households completely covered its surface stretching 1.5 kilometers. The river has fewer waste after several cleanup operations, but the water is black, emitting a strong odour.
Water contaminated with raw sewage flows via open channels into the ocean at Hann Bay on the eastern edge of Dakar's peninsula, whose sandy shorefront is discoloured by stagnant algae. Inadequate sewer infrastructure in the adjacent neighbourhoods of Hann-Bel-air and Mbao means large amounts of solid and liquid waste is released into the bay untreated year-round. On Hann beach, an artisanal fishing hub, old tyres lie around a canal filed with putrid water and trash. "We live in sickness here, because our families are in direct contact with this water and this waste," said fisherman and local resident Pape Malick Ba. Last September, the water and sanitation ministry launched a long-promised project to clean up Hann bay at a cost of 93 billion CFA francs ($168 million). As residents wait for it to yield results, they struggle to keep their beaches clean through citizen initiatives.
