The crisis in water supply: how different it can look through the lens of the human right to water?

The human right to safe drinking water and sanitation was explicitly recognized through resolutions passed by the UN General Assembly 1 in July 2010 and Human Rights Council 2 in September 2010, with strong support from the Brazilian government. The General Assembly’s resolution states explicitly that this right “is essential for the full enjoyment of life and all human rights”, which can be understood in conjunction with other definitions of human rights, for example, that “all human rights are universal, indivisible and interdependent and interrelated” 3. This last statement means that access to safe drinking water and sanitation should be considered a fundamental precondition for the “enjoyment of several human rights, including the rights to education, housing, health, life, work...” and should guarantee gender equality and non-discrimination 4. Specifically, the Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights acknowledged that the right to health extends to the underlying determinants of health, including access to safe drinking water and sanitation 5. The combination of these concepts results in citizens’ entitlement to these rights (including the right to claim them through the legal system) and obligations on the part of national states and service providers. Achieving this human right to water and sanitation (RtWS) means ensuring water with availability, accessibility, quality, safety, and affordability, meeting the requirements of acceptability, dignity, and privacy. As Brazil now faces a dramatic crisis in water supply, severely affecting its most populated, urbanized, and industrialized region, the RtWS framework can serve as an invaluable perspective for assessing the situation. First, assessing the roots of the current crisis, if water providers had respected RtWS principles, the current climatic oscillation would not have turned into a water scarcity for human consumption. Key RtWS principles include “maximum available resources” and the need for appropriate planning to ensure access to water. In addition, retrogression in access violates the right to water. We can safely state that, if adequate planning for the water supply in the affected localities, amphasizing water security, had been properly adopted, the problem would not exist in its current intensity. When simulating future scenarios, appropriate strategic planning must take into account climatic situations with low probability of occurrence, among other variables 6. Leading contemporary trends in water planning argue in favor of strategic, creative, and participatory planning, and that adaptive water systems should be designed with the capacity for social learning 7,8,9. If the water planning process in Brazil had effectively incorporated these prin-