Abstract
Climate change presents a major threat to water and sanitation services. There is an urgent need to understand and improve resilience, particularly in rural communities and small towns in low- and middle-income countries that already struggle to provide universal access to services and face increasing threats from climate change. To date, there is a lack of a simple framework to assess the resilience of water and sanitation services which hinders the development of strategies to improve services. An interdisciplinary team of engineers and environmental and social scientists were brought together to investigate the development of a resilience measurement framework for use in low- and middle-income countries. Six domains of interest were identified based on a literature review, expert opinion, and limited field assessments in two countries. A scoring system using a Likert scale is proposed to assess the resilience of services and allow analysis at local and national levels to support improvements in individual supplies, identifying systematic faults, and support prioritisation for action. This is a simple, multi-dimensional framework for assessing the resilience of rural and small-town water and sanitation services in LMICs. The framework is being further tested in Nepal and Ethiopia and future results will be reported on its application.
Highlights
Climate change is the defining challenge for the 21st century
This paper reports on the outcome of this work and presents a proposed framework for assessing the resilience of rural and small-town water supplies and sanitation systems in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs)
The impacts of climate change impacts on water and sanitation services have not received the attention it deserves to date in LMICs, and the sector must address this more systematically
Summary
Climate change is the defining challenge for the 21st century. The increase in global temperatures, changing patterns of precipitation, and more frequent extreme events caused by a changing climate will directly impact water and sanitation services, affecting all aspects of service delivery and undermining the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 61,2. As climate changes are increasingly felt, there is growing interest in how the resilience of systems and communities can be built to cope with climate threats[3]. The Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change defines resilience as “the capacity of social, economic and environmental systems to cope with a hazardous event or trend or disturbance, responding or reorganizing in ways that maintain their essential function, identity and structure, while maintaining the capacity for adaptation, learning, and transformation”[3]. The Vision 2030 study provided the first global assessment of vulnerability and resilience of water and sanitation technologies and management systems[5]. There have been global assessments of the likely resilience of commonly used sanitation systems[6] and the tools from Vision 2030 have been applied in studies of adaptation strategies for water and sanitation in African cities[7] and the resilience of sanitation in small island states[8]. The potential for Water Safety Plans (WSP) as tools to manage future climate risks to water supply has been identified[9], leading to revised guidance[10] and some evidence of integration of climate into WSPs in a number of settings, relatively few from
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