Where is Tap Water Safe (and Unsafe) to Drink?

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What could be simpler than drinking a glass of water?

When you turn on the tap in the United Kingdom, you consider what comes out will be drinkable. Indeed, the General Assembly of the United Nations has access to safe drinking water as a human right. And yet, more than 25% of the world’s population lives in water-stressed nations. According to the World Health Organization, a similar number use a drinking water source polluted with feces.

Unfortunately, national wealth can determine whether a person can pour a safe glass of water to drink. According to the Environmental Performance Index (EPI), “good [environmental health] policy results are correlated with wealth (GDP per capita), meaning that economic prosperity makes it possible for countries to invest in policies and programs that lead to desirable outcomes.” To make matters worse, the heavy industry developing nations employ in the attempt to level up can further compromise the local water resources.

The EPI index is created to rate and monitor water quality worldwide. Specialists assign each nation a water quality score based on the number of (adjusted) life years lost per 100 thousand persons (DALY rate) due to exposure to unsafe drinking water. This DALY rate is based on the IHME’s Global Burden of Disease research.

To illustrate the situation’s starkness and flag the nations where it is and isn’t safe to drink tap water, QS Supplies has used EPI and CDC data to create the new world map.

Key Findings

• 10 nations have the maximum 100 EPI score for water, and they are all in Europe. Nevertheless, the European countries of Albania (50.3) and Moldova (50.8) achieve barely half of this.
• The 24 nations with the lowest EPI rating are all in Africa, and the CDC cautions against drinking tap water anywhere in Africa.
• The CDC doesn’t recommend drinking tap water in much of Asia and Latin America.

The Quality of Drinking Water Around the World

The European countries, including the United Kingdom, score a perfect 100, meaning the local tap water is the safest in the world to drink. In contrast, many African countries are at the scale’s most dangerous end.

The Countries You Can and Can’t Drink Tap Water

According to CDC advice, only 50 countries offer drinkable tap water, most of which are in Europe. In comparison, only three North American countries (the United States, Canada, and Costa Rica) and one South American nation (Chile) have drinkable tap water. Every African country and most countries in parts of Asia and Oceania (including China and the Philippines) lack safe water.

Methodology

To find out how safe drinking water is in different nations, QS Supplies took data from Yale University’s Environmental Performance Index (UWD), precisely looking at the unsafe drinking water category.

This index looks at drinking water quality in 180 nations worldwide based on the number of age-standardized disability-adjusted life-years lost per 100 thousand persons (DALY rate) due to exposure to unsafe drinking water. All countries on the list are ranked by a score from 0 to 100, with the highest score of 100, meaning very safe drinking water and 0 suggesting the most unsafe.

To uncover whether tap water is safe to drink in each nation, the QS Supplies team then visited the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website and retrieved all the countries from its ‘destinations’ list, then looked at each nation’s ‘stay healthy and safe’ and ‘eat and drink safely’ sections to find out whether it is advised or not to drink tap water in that country.

The data is correct as of January 2023.