Sanitation plays a vital role in building climate resilience. To maximise this, sanitation systems must themselves be resilient to the impacts of climate change. This new report sets out the need to take a systems-wide perspective along the entire sanitation service chain, and highlights key opportunities and approaches to achieve this.

Ensuring a good quality water supply that is free from contamination is key to meeting the global goal of providing everyone with access to safely managed water by 2030. This brief summarises the findings of an in-depth review of WaterAid’s work, aimed at safeguarding water quality carried out in 2019–20.

WaterAid releases a new report: “Turn the tide: The state of the world’s water 2021”, which shows how people are losing access to clean water as longer droughts dry up springs, seawater infiltrates groundwater supplies and landslides take out water pumps.

Living without sanitation is endangering the health and livelihoods of the world’s poorest people. A staggering two billion still do not have access to a decent toilet. Now, climate change is aggravating this sanitation crisis.

At WaterAid’s Water and Climate Summit in London, March 2020, a High-Level Group led by HRH Prince of Wales pledged to work towards boosting available finance for climate-resilient water, sanitation and hygiene, creating the Water and Climate Finance Initiative (WCFI).

Globally, more than one in five children are stunted. In Ethiopia, it's more than one in three. With evidence growing on the connections between undernutrition and poor water, sanitation and hygiene, WaterAid and Action Against Hunger investigated how to tackle these two challenges, at policy level and on the ground.

Access to safe drinking water and sanitation is the foremost resilience measure for climate change adaptation in the long run as well as an emergency response to get life back on track after an extreme weather event or a disaster.

The Crisis in the Classroom: The State of the World’s Toilets 2018, reveals the countries where children are struggling most to access a toilet at school and at home, and highlights those that have made good progress.

Already more than 60% of humanity lives in areas of water stress, where the supply of water cannot or will not continue to meet demand. If water is not managed more prudently – from source, to tap, and back to source – the crises observed today will become the catastrophes of tomorrow.

The paper draws significant inputs and builds on the thematic Sector Financing WASH paper prepared by the Secretariat for SACOSAN VII, Ministry of Climate Change, Government of Pakistan.