Access to Clean Water and Safe Sanitation is the Missing Link in Urban Climate Adaptation

Clean water and safe sanitation services have the potential to play a major role in helping the poorest urban communities adapt to climate change, but more needs to be done to enable cities to expand these services, a new report by Water & Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP) has found.

Drawing on evidence from seven countries, the report, entitled The Missing Link in Climate Adaptation: How Improved Access to Water and Sanitation is Helping Cities Adapt to Climate Change finds that the importance of clean water and sanitation services in urban climate resilience has been significantly undervalued. The report makes four recommendations for promoting climate resilient water and sanitation services:

• Use every drop: cutting down on losses within city water networks to help cope with water scarcity
• Protect the infrastructure: improving the design and management of facilities to enable them to withstand flooding and storms
• Strengthen systems: clarifying and enforcing responsibilities for delivering services to the poorest and ensuring that climate risks are reflected in regulations, standards and financing frameworks
• Integrate with wider city resilience: increasing coordination between improvements to water and sanitation services and other areas of urban development.

“Access to safe water and sanitation services is essential for people to lead healthy, productive lives,” said Neil Jeffery, Chief Executive of Water & Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP). “Climate change is already causing significant damage to the ability of cities to provide equitable access to water and sanitation services, and these impacts will only worsen in coming years.”

“And yet, expansion and protection of water and sanitation services is not a core part of most cities’ adaptation work. This needs to change.” Climate change is affecting access to water, sanitation and hygiene through six factors: reduced rainfall, more intense rainfall, rising sea levels, extreme weather events, rising temperatures and internal displacement. These challenges are further exacerbated by a wide range of issues in low-income communities such as: poor drainage, lack of solid waste management, and low-quality housing.

WSUP’s recommendations are intended to help support cities and water and sanitation service providers to respond effectively to the urgent threat posed by climate change, based on experiences to date in the seven countries analyzed. Challenges identified in the report include: damage to infrastructure in Mozambique due to the increasing frequency of cyclones; coastal water sources at risk in Kenya due to rising sea levels; depleting water resources in Madagascar and Zambia caused by drought; and massive rural to urban migration in Bangladesh, increasing demand for water and sanitation services.

Download ‘The Missing Link in Urban Climate Adaptation’ here