Abstract
Abstract Even as progress has been made in extending access to safe water and sanitation under the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), substantial disparities in water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) services persist in high-income countries around the world. These gaps in service occur disproportionately among historically marginalized, rural, informal, and Indigenous communities. This paper synthesizes results from a side session convened at the 2020 University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Water and Health conference focused on knowledge gaps, challenges, and approaches to achieve SDG 6 among marginalized communities in high-income countries. We provide approaches and next steps to advance sustainable WASH services in communities that have often been overlooked.
Highlights
The era of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has seen continued progress toward global targets for access to safe water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH)
Knowledge gaps Despite the large amount of information and data available in high-income countries, significant WASH-related knowledge gaps exist
Elected officials, water and wastewater professionals, and the general public in high-income countries are often not aware of the communities that lack WASH access, which limits the appropriate allocation of resources to make improvements
Summary
The era of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has seen continued progress toward global targets for access to safe water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH). These trends reflect coordinated efforts by governmental, international, and aid-based organizations that have contributed to 1.8 billion people gaining access to drinking water and 2.1 billion gaining access to sanitation since the year 2000 (Joint Monitoring Program 2019) Despite this progress, significant inequalities still exist in WASH access (Anthonj et al 2019), including in highincome countries where 6.2 million people were estimated to still rely on untreated surface water or unimproved drinking water sources and at least 9 million more lacked piped water in 2017 ( Joint Monitoring Program 2020). Even where piped water supplies and basic sanitation do exist, problems of poor water quality, inadequate quantity, and unsafe waste management are often found among low-income, historically marginalized, and minority populations, as documented among Indigenous Canadians living on reserves (Anthonj et al 2019); remote Indigenous communities in Australia (Hall 2019; Hall et al 2020); Tribal Nations (Eggers et al 2018) and Alaska Native communities in the U.S (Mattos et al 2021); itinerant and sedentary Roma communities across Europe belonging to diverse groups including Sinti, Travellers, Kalé, and Gens du voyage (Van Hout & Staniewicz 2012; Davis & Ryan 2016; Anthonj et al 2020); displaced persons (Araya et al 2019), migrant communities (Semenza et al 2016), and refugee camps (Dhesi et al 2018; Tsesmelis et al 2020) in Europe; rural and peri-urban Black communities in the southern U.S (Stillo & Gibson 2016; Flowers et al 2019); Hispanic communities along the U.S.-Mexico border (Rowles et al 2020) and in California’s San Joaquin Valley (Balazs et al 2011); and people experiencing homelessness (Capone et al 2018; Frye et al 2019)
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