Sustainable Development Goal #6 is clean water and sanitation, ensuring availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation.
Proper nutrition is an important part of sports, we can use sport to help drive the importance of everyone having access to safe and affordable drinking water. Sporting facilities can help do this by having water fountains at their facilities to give access to drinking water to people who use the facilities.
As often seen in these articles, sport can be used as an important tool for sharing information and education on these very important issues. Sport can help target 6.3 specifically through raising awareness. Target 6.3 is:
By 2030, improve water quality by reducing pollution, eliminating dumping and minimizing release of hazardous chemicals and materials, halving the proportion of untreated wastewater and substantially increasing recycling and safe reuse globally
Plastic pollution in our oceans is a huge challenge. Sport can shine a really important light on this, and is:
The IOC teamed up with UN Environment for it’s clean seas campaign.
In 2018, UK Environment Minister called on sport leaders to join the fight
Precious Plastic Mauritius takes plastics out of the ocean and repurposes them
Aquatic sports especially can be used to highlight the need for reducing pollution, dumping and wastewater. Sporting events held in the open water should help clean the waters before the events by placing plastic sea bins.
Sport can also contribute to this goal by focusing on target 6.4 which is to increase water-use efficiency across all sectors. Sport facilities and offices for sport organisations can focus on water efficiency. For example, the Olympic House will use 60% less municipal water than a conventional new construction.
Sport settings can also be an important place for access to adequate sanitation. When sport facilities are being built it is important to include proper sanitation into the plans. Important messages on hygiene and sanitation can be passed through sport programming.