Thanks for this question, Petra.

I wonder if two things are needed for the rural sanitation sector: One, further awareness of the relevance climate change for rural sanitation. And two, a clearer picture of what timely and effective action looks like.

On the first front, it's intuitive that an increase in heavy rainfall and subsequent flooding will adversely affect sanitation, but maybe it's not yet clear what the extent of this problem will be. Recent studies in Mozambique and Ethiopia found that 45% and 43% of study participants respectively did not repair/rebuild their latrines after they were damaged by floods. Meanwhile, research in Botswana found that droughts (which may be getting worse due to climate change) cause increased use of pit latrines that contaminate key groundwater sources used for drinking. I think as we get more quantifiable measures showing the link between changes in climate extremes and WASH outcomes, more impetus to act will emerge.

It's also worth noting that climate change doesn't just affect sanitation through the direct impacts of incremental changes in temperature and precipitation. Everything happens in the context of climate change now. Any conventional sanitation challenge that you can think of - behaviour change, ongoing financing, governance - is influenced by climate change such that all these challenges are accompanied by increased volatility and uncertainty.  All aspects of sanitation service delivery (and all aspects of life, really) will need to increasingly work in a  context of regional- and world-disturbing events. I think there is increasing acceptance of this, especially with COVID-19.

On the second front, we need to start trialing and sharing ideas on climate resilience with one another so we can build a knowledge base of what could and should be done. I'm part of an effort to synthesise and share work and research being done within the DFAT Water for Women Fund on inclusive climate resilience for WASH. Sharing initiatives like this are especially important when the sector is exploring unfamiliar territory.

As Paresh mentioned, engagement with other sectors is important for tacking the challenge of living in an increasingly extreme and unpredictable world. Impacts of climate change on economies and environments at large-scales are too big for any one sector to tackle alone.

I'd like to point out a related recent SuSanA publication titled  Shaping the water sector to be more climate resilient - A plea for greater and wider collaboration  introduced on the forum earlier.

The following text from the introduction states the premise:

These appear to be overwhelming challenges. However, many of the concepts, technologies and resources needed to overcome them already exist, but are scattered across different organizations in multiple countries. It is widely acknowledged that the chances of achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 6 (Clean Water and Sanitation) and 13 (Climate Action) by 2030 would be significantly improved by increased collaboration, with fewer trade-offs and greater synergy.

The publication discusses 6 case-studies of how sectoral and cross-sectoral cooperation at governmental, institutional and personal levels was achieved and their impacts. 

Important to note as member of the network is a section in chapter 3 that discusses the background paper titled “ Opportunities for Sustainable Sanitation in Climate Action ” prepared by WG 3.

Regards
paresh 

Last question for the discussion forum:

What do we need in order for the WASH sector to take timely, relevant and effective action on climate change?

Your views, opinions and ideas, please!

When it comes to addressing climate change, what do need in our sanitation programming? Do we continue with the same approaches to creating safe, adequate and sustainable sanitation for all? Are they enough and will they manage to address the challenges posed by climate-related impacts? Or do we need new strategies, ideas, modalities to more specifically meet the needs of climate-related impacts on sanitation?

What do you think?

Hi Petra and all,

I just wanted to take this opportunity to promote the forthcoming Sanitation Learning Hub webinar/side-session related to this discussion:

Building climate resilience towards sanitation and hygiene

Thursday 19th August: 13.00 – 12.30 UK time 

This session (part of 31st SuSanA Meeting ) will present a framework to understand how climate impacts affect rural sanitation and hygiene practices. It will explore the direct and  indirect impacts of climate hazards and the various factors that govern people’s responses. The social context (norms and psychological factors) and local activities shape how these hazards impact physical access to sanitation infrastructure, access to local resources and markets, and livelihoods needed to support safe sanitation.

Register for meeting

Objectives:

• Present a framework to understand the impact of climate hazards on sanitation access and behaviour based on gender, age, location and more.
• Present case studies to unpack rural sanitation prioritisation during and after disasters
• Discuss ways to build community resilience to climate shocks and stresses.

Presenters:

• Dr Jeremy Kohlitz and Ruhil Iyer. Climate change and rural sanitation: how do we start?
• Prof. Deepthi Wickramsinghe. Is emergency sanitation management gender sensitive?
• Dr. Devanmini Halwathura. Droughts and doubts: Has sanitation gained enough attention in drought situations?
• Dr. Indrajith Pal. Water related disasters and sanitation management

The session will be 90 minutes in total – this will include 25 minutes of breakout discussions where all participants can share their thoughts,
experiences, learning and questions on the issue. For any queries, please email us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Many thanks
Elaine

Hello everyone, kicking off Phase 2 of our online discussion with a new question and looking forward to your views and opinions:

When it comes to climate change and rural sanitation,...

How do we best address climate change impacts in our programmes: by strengthening existing approaches or through radically new ways of working?

In other words, do we need to do the same things that we have always done in rural sanitation, just better, or  is something entirely different needed to respond to climate change impacts on rural sanitation?

Hi Petra, 

I agree with both your points and just to add -

While climate hazards are definitely the new norm, our research and conversations have also identified that a lot of what practitioners are currently doing like - advocating for regular operation and maintenance of latrines and present ways of addressing gender and social inclusion issues within sanitation are already very good practice to draw on and continue to practice. Practitioners regularly also encounter the idea of 'risk' and 'vulnerability' in their existing programming - so these ideas are not new thinking about climate change within sanitation doesn't need to start from scratch. We already have a wealth of good practice to build on from within our existing work in the sector, and like you and Jeremy have indicated, extend this to collaborating with others to address the complexity of impacts. 

I think may be in terms of what information is most needed, many practitioners we interviewed expressed the need for there to be more evidence connecting these links between climate hazards and sanitation - both in terms of the experiences of people within villages and also how programming is being impacted at the community level. For instance, what is the impact on behavior change programming with storms repeatedly damaging latrines? What evidence exists of programs modifying current ways of engagement, what interventions have been successful, unsuccessful and why within contexts experiencing frequent climate disruptions? 

Would be great to hear any experiences that people may have to share around these, and also what others think might be important information we need. 

And following on from Elisabeth's post where she says

"Furthermore, I think it can be difficult to delineate the "normal" things from the "abnormal/climate change induced" things."

Is this a helpful distinction? In my mind, there are two ways of looking at this:

1) We need to get used to the fact that climate change is the new normal (and actually has been for many communities in many places for a long time- we just didn't make it explicit).

2) What is 'normal'? I think we can probably agree that many of the problems we are facing, whether we call them climate related or not, are human-made ie are the results of human activities that have altered the environment in ways that have short term and longer term consequences. For example deforestation, a particular way of farming, water use etc.  Looking at it this way, it is clear that we also need to look beyond the sanitation sector and link up with other areas of knowledge and work if we want to address these issues. A more comprehensive collaborative approach is needed. We discuss this in the Frontiers both as one of the issues stopping us from acting (Section 2) and as one of the suggested approaches in secton 6 (Establishing collaboration and learning to mainstream climate change into sanitation) where we suggest a consortium approach as one way to tackle the complexity of impacts at local level. There was a lot of interest in trialling consortium approaches at the webinar on the 14th.

I wonder whether anyone would like to share their thoughts and questions around what kind of collaborations and cross-sectoral ways of working may be possible where they are.

Thank you Jeremy for your detailed reply to Elisabeth's questions.

As Elisabeth asked to detail impacts of climate change on sanitation, I wondered if by now this is not something we can expect sanitation practitioners to know. As Jeremy says, most practitioners will have encountered these impacts, even if they may not have thought of their work as addressing climate change impacts. In the past, we may have talked about emergency  contexts and post-emergency settings as we did in this Frontiers  Whilst not all emergencies are climate-related, I would suggest that many of the ones we are encountering now, are. Maybe it's time to therefore reframe how we think, talk and approach them.

I am curious to hear from sanitation practitioners in different countries and regions whether they feel we need to talk more about impacts of climate change on rural sanitation or whether this is something most are now familiar with and that we should therefore move on to talking about timely, relevant, practical ways that we can address these in programming? What information is most needed?

Hi Elisabeth,

Thanks for raising thoughts on what are climate impacts exactly.

The IPCC defines impacts as effects of extreme weather, climate events and climate change on natural and human systems. They also view consequences and outcomes as synonymous with impacts.

So, I would call the changes in hazards that you described (increases in floods, droughts, etc.) as climate change effects. The impacts are the outcomes or consequences of these effects for rural sanitation.

In the Frontiers publication, we describe climate hazards in four ways:

Shocks: Events that occur acutely within a short timeframe such as cyclones, flash floods, and wildfires. Climate change my increase the frequency, duration, intensity, and geographic extent of these. It may also make them appear where they never appeared before.
Slow onset: Events that gradually emerge over extended periods of time such as droughts, sea-level rise, and salinisation. Climate change may measurably increase their magnitude, but they come about slowly so people often don't notice them until it's too late.
Trends: Long-term changes in climate variables such average temperature or average rainfall. I agree with Elisabeth that these create less direct impacts for rural sanitation, but can harm livelihoods that in turn affect rural sanitation (more on this below).
Variability and unpredictability: In many regions of the world, climate change is increasing the contrast between seasons (such as increasing contrast in rainfall patterns between wet and dry seasons) and increasing unpredictability of climate and weather. 

Climate change is worsening these hazards, or making them an issue where they were never an issue before, in many regions of the world. What impacts for rural sanitation does this create? We've proposed a few categories of impacts in the Frontiers publication:

Impacts on physical access to sanitation: Shocks in particular can damage/destroy latrine facilities, cause them to become non-operational, or make it difficult to physically reach them. Slow onset hazards can do this as well (albeit more slowly over a longer period of time).
Impacts on access to resources and markets: Shocks and slow onset hazards can cut off access to markets for sanitation products and services, or make resources (water, sand, gravel) temporarily unavailable for constructing, operating and maintaining sanitation. Variability and unpredictability makes it more difficult for emptiers to schedule their services (where this is available) and for NGOs and government to schedule community engagement programs.
Impact on livelihoods: All of the hazards can affect people's ability to make a living. Indirectly this affects sanitation because people will struggle to meet their sanitation needs if their income source is affected (e.g. changes in temperature killing cash crops) and if they have many competing priorities.
Impacts on behaviours: It's difficult to predict how climate hazards affect sanitation and hygiene behaviours (and I'm not aware of any research on this!), but it stands to reason that people may change these behaviours when confronted with extreme weather.

Some documented evidence of these impacts are available in case studies that UTS produced with Plan International in Indonesia and with WaterAid in Timor-Leste .

I think many rural sanitation experts have already encountered most of these impacts in their past work. Climate change will increasingly make these barriers to sustainable sanitation. Perhaps more worryingly, future climate change could cause widespread ecosystem collapse and economic devastation that would overwhelm just about all aspects of rural life - this is an impact on a grander scale that requires responses beyond the rural sanitation sector (ideally avoiding that impact entirely by cutting down GHG emissions!)

Dear Petra,
Thanks for starting this interesting discussion and providing background reading. You asked "What activities are you currently engaged in to address climate change impacts on rural sanitation? What is the biggest challenge you face in this work?" Presumably you would like to hear from practitioners, not from people like me who are into knowledge management and dissemination. 

To make it easier for practitioners to respond, perhaps we should list again what we mean by climate change impacts. I had a quick look at your publication (sanitationlearninghub.org/resource/rural...ideas-into-practice/) but didn't find immediately what I was looking for. A simple list of impacts that are relevant for the WASH sector. Furthermore, I think it can be difficult to delineate the "normal" things from the "abnormal/climate change induced" things. For example, we know that hurricanes have always been around. But now they are perhaps getting more frequent or more violent. Hence, the adaptation methods are essentially the same as before but are now more urgent, right?

Climate change impacts that are relevant for the WASH sector could be:

• Flooding (increase in frequency, duration and extent)
• Droughts (increase in frequency and duration)
• Tropical cyclones (increase in frequency and strength)
• Wildfires
• Sea level rise
• Changes in temperatures and seasons (more important for agriculture maybe)
• Migration, conflict

There is a good Wikipedia article on this topic (not specific to WASH sector) called "Effects of climate change": en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_climate_change
It has sub-articles on regional effects, effects on humans, effects on human health, physical impacts of climate change, ....
There is also a Wikipedia article on climate change adaptation: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_adaptation

So if anyone wants to brush up on the basics of how climate change will affect us, please read there (and if you see gaps or errors please help to improve on that!). 

And then back to the question at hand: "What activities are you currently engaged in to address climate change impacts on rural sanitation? What is the biggest challenge you face in this work?"

Regards,
Elisabeth

Thanks Jeremy. That is really interesting. Looking forward to hearing about the findings.
What strikes me as so important about what you describe here is that people are at the heart of what you are looking at - what are their needs, interests, beliefs, concerns etc? How can we support those who are in positions where decisions get made. Rather than blaming officials for not doing more, it feels constructive to investigate what they might need to be able to act. I'd love to hear from the Water for Women partners in Laos about their experience as they move through the different phases of the project.