Mid-term Status on SDG 6 Indicators: 6.3.2, 6.5.1, & 6.6.1 (2024)

United Nations 2 years ago

Water is vital to human and planetary health and the internationally agreed goals that back it, including the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the Sendai Framework and the Paris Agreement. Yet the triple planetary crisis – the crisis of climate change, nature and biodiversity loss and pollution and waste – is affecting the availability, distribution, quality and quantity of water. Despite water being essential for human health, food security, energy supplies, sustaining cities, and ecosystems and on the front lines of the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution, SDG 6 is alarmingly off-track. For most of the SDG 6 Indicators, the current rate of progress is not fast enough to close the gap before 2030. In some cases, progress is even relapsing. The new mid-term status reports for SDG 6 indicators: 6.3.2, 6.5.1, and 6.6.1 found that if the priorities under SDG 6 are to be achieved by 2030, action on these indicators needs to be accelerated four times faster. These priorities can be ensured if adequate investments are made towards institutions, infrastructure, information, and innovation, where concerted action and institutional coherence is required, and new ideas, tools, and solutions are developed that draw from existing knowledge and indigenous practices. Working with partners within the framework of the UN-Water led Integrated Monitoring Initiative for SDG 6, UNEP officially launched reports, in August 2021, on the three SDG 6 indicators for which it is custodian. These indicator reports are: SDG 6.3.2 – Progress on Ambient Water Quality with a special focus on Health SDG 6.5.1 – Progress on the Implementation of Integrated Water Resources Management with special focus on Climate Change SDG 6.6.1 – Progress on Water-related Ecosystems with a special focus on Biodiversity A key underlying message from these reports is that existing efforts to protect and restore water-related ecosystems must be urgently scaled up and accelerated. Progress Reports can also be found on UN-Water's SDG 6 Progress Reports page
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layersDaily Sustainability Digest

Published about 4 hours ago



Sustainable construction in the UK is accelerating through projects that integrate whole life carbon assessment and embodied carbon reduction into practical, scalable initiatives. The new floating solar farm in a disused Cheshire quarry illustrates how sustainable building design and environmental sustainability in construction can repurpose industrial land for renewable energy generation. This project represents eco-design for buildings with a focus on net zero whole life carbon performance and long-term resource efficiency in construction, aligning with circular economy principles.

Concerns over workforce capacity highlight that life cycle cost strategies and low carbon design ambitions depend on adequate training and sustainable building practices to deliver low embodied carbon materials and energy-efficient buildings at scale. Addressing the construction skills shortage is now central to achieving net zero carbon buildings and decarbonising the built environment, ensuring carbon footprint reduction moves from policy aspiration to measurable outcomes.

Cornwall’s initiative to extract lithium from a restored china clay pit demonstrates circular economy in construction through the recovery of renewable building materials within ecological limits. It exemplifies how environmental product declarations (EPDs) and lifecycle assessment can underpin sustainable material specification and the whole life carbon performance of future low carbon building systems.

Analysts arguing that a fair transition to net zero carbon construction is technologically achievable reinforce confidence across sustainable urban development. The emerging alignment between circular construction strategies, low carbon construction materials, and building lifecycle performance suggests green infrastructure is shifting from pilot projects to mainstream delivery. Sustainable design, informed by life cycle thinking in construction and metrics such as BREEAM v7, is proving essential to transforming green construction into verifiable carbon neutral construction outcomes.

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