The global conversation on "the world we want" continues. The results of the thematic discussions - including water - are expected in June. There are many hints that the goals and targets on basic services like water and sanitation - as included in the MDGs - will be enhanced with greater emphasis on equality and rights.

The Beyond 2015 campaign coalition has developed a position paper suggesting that "while the current MDGs have served to focus efforts on poverty eradication and overall development, progress has been uneven and governance and human rights have been neglected."¹ It hence calls for the foregrounding of the human rights to water and sanitation in the future post 2015 development framework.

WaterAid’s report "Everyone, everywhere" released for the World Water Day this year proposes that the post-2015 framework for development should:
1)    Target universal access to water, sanitation and hygiene by 2030
2)    Address inequalities in water, sanitation and hygiene access
3)    Embed human rights in water sanitation and hygiene provision²

The working groups of the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme’s also suggest universal coverage and the monitoring also of water, sanitation and hygiene at schools. From a rights perspective, it can be noted that the groups agree that progress towards universal coverage should not only be measured as increasing number of people with access to services, but also in terms of reducing inequalities. Such inequalities are to be monitored between:
-    Rich and poor
-    Urban and rural
-    Slums and formal settlements
-    Disadvantaged groups and the general population³

The UN Special Rapporteur on the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation, who chairs the Equality and Non-Discrimination Working Group in the JMP process, presents these ideas on monitoring in a succinct form. (Whereas this document suggests that data should also be "disaggregated according to gender, age and disability," such inequalities related to individual status are not deemed possible by the JMP to monitor as they rely largely on surveys conducted at the household level.)

The extent to whether a rights-perspective actually furthers access to water, sanitation and hygiene is debated. Is it a weakness that so few national legal frameworks include the (human) rights to water and sanitation? Clearly, without legal provisions at national level it is difficult to claim access rights through court processes. Or, human rights can be seen primarily as ethical demands⁴ to be argued as effectively outside of the courts by organized social movements.

The human rights to water and sanitation will be the topic of one of the workshops at the World Water Week in September, 2013. It will look into how research on the rights can be translated into relevant regulatory, legislative and policy instruments, and what are the benefits of using judicial processes for enhancing access to water and sanitation. And in relation to the post-2015 agenda: What are the human rights' implications for monitoring access to water, sanitation and hygiene locally, nationally and globally?

Reference
1. Beyond 2015 (2013) Water in the post-2015 development agenda. Beyond 2015. Global Thematic Consultation on Water and the Post-2015 Development Framework, page 2
2. WaterAid (2013) Everyone, everywhere: A vision for water, sanitation and hygiene post-2015. London, WaterAid. - page 35
3. JMP (2012) Proposal for consolidated drinking water, sanitation and hygiene targets, indicators and definitions. Summary of the consultations. - page 3
4. As argued in Sen, A. (2004) Elements of a Theory of Human Rights. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 32, 315-356.

Recently I was in Botswana giving a course on planning for wastewater and sanitation management for the Department of Water Affairs (DWA) who has recently taken over the mandate for provision of these services. It became very obvious during the week that the participants were interested in managing conventional centralized wastewater systems and did not see a place for decentralized or on-site services in their mandate. In fact, there seems to be no clear institutional mandate for non-centralized services. Previously DWA had responsibility solely for water provision. So perhaps it is not surprising that they see their new sanitation responsibilities purely from the "how do we clean the water" perspective.

This perspective is not at all unusual in the sector which is generally referred to as the water and sanitation sector. The water-sanitation connection is deeply ingrained in the sector. Engineers are trained on technologies based on centralized sewerage and politicians promote these big investments as "state-of-the-art" solutions for their populations. The trouble comes of course when we start to realize that the vast majority of the world’s population does not have access to water-based sanitation and that the costs of building and maintaining such systems are prohibitive to providing sanitation for all. On-site and dry solutions are and will continue to be a critical part of providing the health and environmental benefits of universal sanitation.

Often responsibilities for sanitation get divided up based on desired out-comes, e.g.  health, water or environmental protection. However, this often leads to one-sided thinking on solutions. Such is the case in Botswana where the DWA aims to "promote water conservation through the reuse of treated wastewater" without considering that dry toilets can also conserve water. Housing sanitation in health departments can have the opposite affect with the focus being on pathogen control to the exclusion of reuse potentials. If the contents of pit latrines and septic tanks are classified as solid waste rather than wastewater, responsibility for on-site sanitation can end up with the waste management department who are often not invited into wastewater sector discussions. Determining the proper home for sanitation has major consequences for what type of system is promoted for use and on the potential for treating the waste flows as resources.

So the challenge is how do we find a proper home for sanitation that covers service provision for all (not just those with flush toilets) and at the same time provides opportunities for resource recovery?
A number of Swedish utilities (e.g. Roslagsvatten) have now taken over responsibilities for both wastewater and solid waste which gives them the flexibility take a holistic perspective in handling "waste fractions". Another example is Telge in Södertälje which has collaborated with the Swedish Farmer Association in development of their black water treatment, allowing for out of the box thinking and more possibilities for recycling.  Both have created a home for sanitation by working in wider collaborations than the typical institutional silos of the water-sanitation sector. Perhaps we can share some of these experiences with our colleagues in Botswana?

My youngest daughter and I just finished watching the BBC series on filthy cities, where the journalist Dan Snow digs deep into the historical dirt of London, Paris and New York. For someone in the sanitation business of today it is quite compelling to see how many parallels can be made between e.g. New York of the 19th century and the reality in many mega cities today on dirt and disease, corrupt politicians taking the cash and leaving the trash, slum landlords making fortunes on impoverished slum dwellers, and sewage treatment plants that are unable to cope with the sheer volume of wastewater. My only disappointment on this otherwise excellent series is that Mr Snow misses out on this very obvious link to today’s cities in e.g. South Asia.

Dan Snow also talked about the gong farmers, or muck rakers, of medieval London, who did their best to remove solid and liquid waste from the city. The equivalent of gong farmers also exists today in many cities and towns all over the world. It is easy to forget that the majority of people in African and Asian cities rely on on-site sanitation, if they have access to any sanitation at all (WHO&UNICEF 2000, kolla Chowhudry). These on-site sanitation systems usually consist of pit latrines or septic tanks, both types eventually fill up and are in need of emptying to function in a sustainable way.  The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has financed an excellent study on fecal sludge businesses (can be downloaded here) in thirty different cities and towns across Asia and Africa, a study in which authors found out that 34% of the over 13,000 interviewed households across the thirty cities still use manual emptiers (Chowdhry and Kone, 2012), hence the equivalent of the English gong farmers. I have seen manual pit emptying in peri-urban Dakar, and it is indeed a gory business. An indoor household septic tank was emptied by a local adolescent who had formed a sort of canal on the slightly from the loo towards the entrance sloping hallway floor, between two for the purpose built sand walls about 0.2 m high. He then scooped up the septic tank content with a bucket and sent it into the little canal, in which the sludge slowly found its way out of the house, into the street and over  into a hole the pit emptier had prepared before the onset of the operation. Incredibly messy and very unhygienic; raw fecal sludge is disease-carrying and poses health risks to today’s manual pit emptiers.

In rural Bangladesh manual pit emptiers are probably holding 100% of the market share of the pit emptying business. The organization BRAC (www.brac.net), one of the world’s largest NGOs, has engaged in pit emptying businesses after having been very successful in providing single and double pits to rural Bangladeshis (read more on their sanitation program here). The pit latrines need to be emptied in order for the access to sanitation to be sustained over time. Manual pit emptying in Bangladesh is as stigmatized, unhygienic and hard job today as it used to be in Europe in the past. It is, however, difficult to see how we can quickly move away from manual emptying in many contexts. A more productive and pragmatic solution today is probably to try and improve the situation for manual pit emptiers, which is one aim of BRAC. Fecal sludge has more characteristics than only being a smelly disease-carrier in its raw form. Treated fecal sludge, in which disease-causing microorganisms have been reduced to reasonable levels, actually represents a value as a fertilizer. This is known among farmers all over the world, and fecal sludge, unfortunately often raw, is often used as a fertilizer input in agriculture. BRAC is interested in trying to put the fecal sludge from the pit latrines they help construct into that type of good use, but without the pathogens. One line of BRAC development is therefore micro enterprises with e.g. pit emptiers working together with farmers to produce organic fertilizers out of fecal sludge. The most important nut to crack for this organic fertilizer business to work is development of cheap and simple treatment methods of raw and semi-raw fecal sludge from pit latrines to kill off the sturdiest of the sturdiest among the disease-causing organisms: helminths. BRAC has in fact launched, through IRC, an international call for proposals on this very topic, click here, so please, if you have good and simple ideas on fecal sludge treatment methods, do not hesitate, submit your proposal before Jan 11, 2013 to help sanitation development in general and Bangladeshi pit emptiers in particular!

Dan Snow ended the program on NY by highlighting how cities are tethering on the edge of destruction under their own filth and how we over the centuries have found ways to deal with the filth, not only through technical inventions but also through good governance. He said that the battle against filth will never be over, which is of course true (there is every day evidence of that in my own kitchen!). When sanitation systems break down, as in NY during the hurricane Sandy, cities are flooded with both liquid and solid waste. Other cities and towns, like e.g. Dhaka, are flooded on a daily basis with liquid and solid waste irrespective of whether a hurricane has passed by or not. There is still a long way to go to get the world as a whole up to speed on sanitation. Improvement of fecal sludge treatment is one good way of contributing to the sector development, so do check the above link and submit your ideas!

References

• Chowdhry, S. and Kone. D. 2012. Business Analysis of Fecal Sludge Management: Emptying and Transportation Services in Africa and Asia, Accessed on Dec 4, 2012.
• WHO & UNICEF. 2000. Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation. Global Water Supply and Sanitation Assessment 2000 report. Accessed on Dec 5, 2012.

More interesting reading material on fecal sludge management and emptying

• Eales, K. 2005. Bringing Pit Emptying out of the Darkness - A Comparison of Approaches in Durban, South Africa and Kibera, Kenya.  Accessed on Dec 5, 2012.
• Kone D., 2010. Making urban excreta and wastewater management contribute to cities' economic development: a paradigm shift. Water Policy 12 pp. 602-10.
• Kvarnström, E., Verhagen, J., Nilsson, M., Srikantaiah, V., Ramachandran, S., Singh, K. 2012. The business of the honey-suckers in Bengaluru (India): The potentials and limitations of commercial fecal sludge recycling - an explorative study. Occasional paper 48 (online). The Hague: IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre. Accessed on Dec 5, 2013. 
• Mbéguéré, M., Gning, J.B., Dodane, P.H. and Koné, A., 2010. Socio-economic profile and profitability of faecal sludge emptying companies. Resources, Conservation and Recycling 54, pp. 1288-95.
• Schaub-Jones, D., 2005. Sanitation Partnerships: Beyond Storage: On-Site Sanitation as an Urban System. [online] London: Building Partnerships for Development in Water and Sanitation. Accessed on Dec 5, 2013. 
• Seidu, R., 2010. Disentangling the risk factors and health risks associated with faecal sludge and wastewater reuse in Ghana. PhD, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Department of Mathematical Sciences and Technology.
• WRC. 2011. What happens when the pit is full? Developments in on-site fecal sludge management. Seminar report. Accessed on Dec 5, 2012.

As we move towards the year of 2015 - the day of reckoning for the Millennium Declaration - there is indeed a lot of focus on the MDG indicators. After all, they provide our main mechanism to empirically test the sincerity of our commitment to poverty eradication, and quantify our ability to deal with challenges of global magnitude. No doubt, the current MDG indicators on water and sanitation (target 7c) have their shortcomings. The Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) of WHO and UNICEF relies primarily on national data - and at least in low-income countries - often of a dubious quality. There has also been much debate over definitions such as “access to safe water”, “improved water source” and “improved sanitation”, as well as their different interpretations in urban and rural contexts. Especially in the urban low-income areas some of these definitions carry little relevance as they don’t fit nicely into the unique contexts of informality. Moreover, with the current aggregated global MDG targets, we are kept in the dark about what consumer groups actually get the services.  The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights to water and sanitation, Ms Catharina de Albuquerque, has particularly expressed a concern that “interventions in water and sanitation tend to improve access only or primarily for those who are relatively easy to reach, and risk reinforcing existing inequalities” (read more).

According to the most recent estimates by JMP, the world has already met the overall target on water, but will miss the sanitation target. Looking at the regional picture, we also know that sub-Saharan Africa will most likely miss both. If we unpack data further at national level, it becomes obvious that meeting the MDGs on water and sanitation does not necessarily mean that the hoped-for improvements benefit the most disadvantaged groups. Even in top performing countries like Uganda, investments seem to have mostly benefitted the middle class in the cities. Jenny Fredby (currently at Water Aid) and I recently concluded in a paper in the Journal of East African Studies that the water utility in Kampala, the capital of Uganda, is still grappling with technological and institutional solutions to serve the large number of urban poor in informal areas, while rolling out services to the middle class has been much easier through a policy on subsidised connections. Even in countries that are on track towards the MDGs, such an ‘equality gap’ can persist. However, there is today global consensus – articulated within the United Nations framework – that safe water and adequate sanitation are human rights. Against this backdrop it is indeed problematic if MDG indicators do not capture and measure the ability and ambitions of governments to progressively realise these rights and close the equality gap.

So how can new indicators help? First and foremost by highlighting the outcomes for different user groups within countries. If access to services is reported for different income groups, it will be easier to track how the governments (and donors) live up to the obligation to progressively realise the rights to water and sanitation for all. In a new consultative draft circulated by JMP, all WASH-related indicators are supposed to be “disaggregated by rural and urban, by wealth, by slums and formal urban settlements, and by other disadvantage identified through participatory national processes taking into account prohibited grounds of discrimination.” Furthermore, the new targets encompass a “service ladder” in which rights can be progressively fulfilled as service provision gradually moves from basic to more advanced services. Hopefully, this can incentivise national and local service providers to close the ‘equality gap’, by offering “some for all” before moving on to higher level of services.


Source: WHO / UNICEF 2012. Public Consultation on Consolidated drinking-water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) targets, indicators and definitions. 5th November, 2012.

Probably, the practical realities will catch up with the proposed monitoring framework. It is already a challenge to acquire reliable data on today’s relatively straight-forward indicators, and dealing with these more sophisticated and disaggregated data will not be easier. More and better data will also have cost implications, and capacity will have to be built in national monitoring systems. WASH monitoring in the post-2015 period will have to strike a balance between the optimal and the doable. In this search, UNICEF and WHO now invite comments until November 23 from sector actors all over the world at www.wssinfo.org/post-2015-monitoring/working-groups/. We should all strive to contribute to this process now; the world will live with these indicators for some 25 years. Hopefully, we will ultimately not just measure the right things, but also get it right!
 

Those who watched the action (live or virtually) in Rio de Janeiro last June, when the world came together for the big summit on sustainable development, will remember that the Green Economy went from being a big idea that would unite the world and "place sustainability at the heart of economic decision-making," to being viewed with suspicion as a "controversial concept" that split the world along rich-poor lines. 

The critical words were hard. Some (mostly those from the developed or wealthy countries) were calling the actions of government in Rio a "betrayal" of the dream a Green Economy because they did not explicitly tackle the issue of growth. Others (largely from developing countries) viewed the Green Economy as a kind of ruse, on the part of the rich nations, to limit the growth potential of developing countries.

The final Rio+20 outcome document is a study in diplomatic compromise:  the Green Economy is "considered," "acknowledged," and "viewed," but it is not formally endorsed or adopted by the member states of the United Nations as the guiding principle that many hoped it would be.

Does that mean the Green Economy is on the way out? Hardly. The concept is continuing to work its way into the heart of policy-making around the world, just as the concept’s designers hoped.

The Rio+20 meeting should be seen not as a death knell for the Green Economy, but as a rite of passage, a tough initiation ritual for this new idea as it entered the rough-and-tumble world of international negotiations.

And: it survived the beating. In fact, the Green Economy is even riding the wave of Rio+20 deeper into precisely those regions of the world that expressed the greatest misgivings.

Consider, for example, this recent news story from Africa, "Green Economy Takes Hold in African Countries". The African Union and UNEP have moved forward with the concept, under mantle of the firm decisions taken at Rio+20 to advance the Sustainable Consumption and Production agenda.

One of the main focus areas? Water.

"Demand-side management of energy use and of water use in Uganda and Zambia have been undertaken under the [African Ten-Year Framework of the Programme on Sustainable Consumption and Production.] ... Others include a water saving initiative of beverages industries in Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe ..."

In the direct aftermath of the Rio+20 summit, Green Economy champions were sober, but not dispirited. "Rio+20 has helped the concept of a green economy take its first tentative steps into the world," wrote Oliver Greenfield, convenor of the Green Economy coalition. "The sustainable development community now has a mandate, albeit weak, for many of the things we wanted."

Indeed a direct textual comparison of the Rio+20 document with similar declarations ten and twenty years ago reveals that Green Economy and other previously alternative ideas have emerged, rather suddenly, as mainstream practice - recognized by a consensus of the world’s governments. Here is my own analysis of the Green Economy elements that Rio+20 recognized as the "new normal," but which were previously nowhere in sight in these international processes.

First and most important, the world's governments agreed that we are in crisis. This may seem a rather obvious point, but it is actually a breakthrough. The word "crisis" has been studiously avoided in previous such global declarations. There were concerns and worries, but no crisis. Rio+20 changed that dramatically. Now, world leaders acknowledge (in paragraph 20) that we have "multiple financial, economic, food and energy crises, which have threatened the ability of all countries, in particular developing countries, to achieve sustainable development." (One might have hoped that they would add water to that list of crises; but water does get substantial "recognition", in UN speak, and is mentioned over 30 times.)

Second, the governments in Rio recognized "the need for broader measures of progress to complement GDP." This provides an enormous boost to the niche topic where I made my own start in sustainability consulting, namely, the development of sustainability indicators. This fall alone, I will attend two major congresses on the topic of creating better measures of national well-being than the GDP, one sponsored by the Austrian government, the other a global forum in India, organized by the OECD.

Third, the nations of the world declared in Rio that they "support national regulatory and policy frameworks that enable business and industry to advance sustainable development initiatives taking into account the importance of corporate social responsibility." To rephrase, they want more CSR, and more companies embracing Green Economy practices ... and they want more policies to push companies in that direction as well.

Fourth, fifth, and sixth, the world's governments endorsed (the formal word is "encouraged") a life-cycle approach, sustainable design, and extended producer responsibility for the products they make. These concepts are cornerstones of the Green Economy. They are also essential practices for assessing, avoiding, and reducing negative impacts on the world’s water resources.

The positive post-Rio news does not end there. Those who attended Rio (I did not) generally report that while the UN negotiations were dispiriting, the buzz of energy and innovation that characterized the rest of that once-a-decade global happening was exciting and inspiring. Business, education, civil society, local governments and many other sectors are not waiting around for the world’s leaders to tell them how to save the planet; they are busy working doing just that, and they are leading the way.

So, where is the Green Economy?  Look around, you’ll find it popping up through the pavement, all around the world. 

Alan AtKisson is president of the AtKisson Group and co-president of the International Network of Resource Information Centers, aka the "Balaton Group". He has been writing and consulting on sustainable development since 1988. See www.AtKisson.com for more info.

This question was posed by Dr Kelly Klima, Center for Clean Air Policy, Washington, in a vivid discussion in the discussion group "Adaptability, Climate Adaptation Network" on the LinkedIn forum. The discussion started a month ago and has attracted 41 comments. The discussion that took its point of departure in the figure below started very broadly although emphasizing on building resilience - more of building environmental resilience for the benefit of human being - but ended in a discussion more focused on adaptation per se.

 
Penney 2008
The discussion was very interesting, a problem was however that it focused more on definitions of the terminology and less on the issue of building resilience, and with a rather developed country perspective.

What is interesting although depressing to see is that this figure that at first sight looks rather comprehensive, including the field where the suggested measures could benefit both mitigation and adaptation, still only takes water aspects into account from a Water and Energy Conservation-perspective. This “northern-biased” perspective lacks much of the integrated approach needed to succeed in implementing adaptation and mitigation.

Maybe the approach represented in this figure is one explanation why the interlinked climate and water still has not gained the full acceptance in the UNFCCC-negotiations. To overcome this lack of acceptance the Water and Climate Coalition has actively worked to achieve an increased interest among the national delegations to bring the issue higher on the official UNFCCC agenda. As a consequence of such an increased understanding the UNFCCC COP at its seventeenth session (Decision 6/CP.17) "requested the secretariat to organize a technical workshop on water, climate change impacts and adaptation strategies, in collaboration with Nairobi work programme partner organizations and other relevant organizations". The workshop, bringing together experts from different organizations, came up with proposals that will be brought back to the next UNFCCC COP-meeting.

One of the interesting activities presented at the workshop held 18-20 July, 2012, in Mexico City, was the "Water Security and Climate Resilient Development; AMCOW Strategic Framework", that has been developed by AMCOW (African Ministers' Council on Water) with the assistance of Global Water Partnership. This Strategic Framework was discussed during the African Water Forum in May, 2012 and was officially launched to the full international audience during the World Water Week in August, 2012. The GWP program that has assisted in developing the Strategic Framework is the "Water, Climate and Development Programme for Africa" with the 'aims to integrate water security and climate resilience in development plans in Africa'. Hence, even though the rather 'northern-biased' discussion on adaptation and climate resilience that has just been ongoing in the LinkedIn adaptation group, the countries most in need for building climate resilience linked to their transboundary waters are increasingly aware of the burning needs and are on their way addressing those needs.
 

In recent years, much media, academic and policy attention has focused on the rapid growth of large-scale land deals around the world. The rush to acquire land resources for alternative energy, food security and environmental services has been labeled 'land grabbing'. This has made global headlines and is argued to contribute to skyrocketing global food prices. There is a large literature, both popular and academic, that describes this. For example, "Land grabbers: Africa’s hidden revolution" in the Guardian in May 2012 described how an oil billionaire has brought large areas of former natural forest under agriculture in Western Ethiopia, severely damaging the environment and destroying the local population’s livelihood basis. The food produced - in excess of a million tons of rice per year - is shipped to Saudi Arabia. The quantity of virtual water leaving the Nile Basin is massive. Compared to the huge Gezira scheme established in nearby Sudan in 1914 by a colonial power, is there any difference? Was that a case of "water grabbing" as well? How do we define "water grabbing"?

Until today, the effects that 'land grabbing' has on existing water resources have largely been ignored. Growing evidence, however, suggests that in many cases land grabbing may be motivated by the desire to capture water resources. Still, to associate land grabbing only to large-scale agriculture for food, feed and fuel crops is probably not correct. Recent studies are beginning to move beyond this important but still rather limited view (see reference below). Land development as linked to water resources should be seen in relation to a wide range of activities that span the food, water, energy, industry and even water pollution domains. 

Altogether, the term "water grabbing" is increasingly being used today (Googling the term provides some 28 million hits). The connotation is typically negative; it is about exploitation, environmental degradation, and dirty deals. Cases that are often referred to include hydropower development in Laos, (promoted by neighboring Thailand), water transfers from the Palestinian West Bank into Israel, state-supported water development schemes in India and Kenya, and the well-known agricultural schemes along the Nile River in the Sudan, producing food for far-way populations in China, India and the Middle East. Would similar cases also include the export of tea from Sri Lanka, wheat from the US and rice from Thailand, as well as wine from South Africa and water transfer from Malaysia to Singapore?       

When the Gezira scheme was established a hundred years ago the driver was not water scarcity, it was colonial imperialism, making money and establishing power and influence. Today, however, we see other reasons for virtual water flows. Some are indeed linked to water scarcity, while others are linked to e.g. trade and export earnings, a lack of land for agriculture, or a quest for tropical fruits. Few would argue that wheat production in Saudi Arabia based on desalinated seawater or fossil groundwater is sound natural resources management; it is better for such a country to import food (if they have the financial resources) from countries or region more endowed with water and thus contribute to an "optimization" of the world's water system.

To trade water - like water flowing into Singapore or the export of "wine virtual water" from South Africa - is a fundamental process for national well-being and development. It is also a way to handle global water scarcity. When it is done according to sound policies and a respect for the environment and marginal groups, it is fine and should be supported like any other form of international collaboration. However, when the benefits are not shared equally, the environment mismanaged, poor people marginalized, and influential individuals or even whole nations given the opportunity to exploit faraway water resources at little cost, it is about something else - water grabbing.

Further reading:
A thematic issue on “water grabbing” in Water Alternatives (June 2012) contains 15 academic articles. They problematize the issue and provide examples of “water grabbing” from around the world. It is available for free at http://www.water-alternatives.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=45&Itemid=1. In addition, the website http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/newmandala/2012/08/06/thailands-mekong-water-grab/ provides a particular focus on Southeast Asia and hydropower development in the region. 
Finally, click here for the World Water Week in Stockholm reference.
 

Bangladesh is among the countries that are on the track to fulfill Millennium Development Goal for child mortality. An important factor behind this is the change of water sources from ponds and canals to groundwater. Unfortunately it was found that a large fraction of the wells drilled contained toxic levels of arsenic. Effects of chronic exposure with the levels found in Bangladesh and adjoining West Bengal in India show up only after 10-15 years which means that millions of wells were drilled before this problem was discovered. Remedies have been tested, such as filters which do function technically but not socially as the handling of water is mainly a task for women and they cannot find time for using and caring of filters. In the last few years local drillers have found that they can use the color of sediments to find a groundwater low in iron. As in this case arsenic levels are closely related to iron contents in the water these sediments also often provide low arsenic water. Research has shown that this simple strategy is likely to be sustainable with a low risk for cross-contamination from over- and underlying sediments with arseniferous groundwater (Robinson et al. 2011).

However, the low iron and arsenic groundwater may contain elevated concentrations of manganese. Manganese in drinking water has been considered as a technical problem, dis-coloring water with manganese precipitates during distribution. However, recent epidemiological investigations have shown that manganese in drinking water may lower the intellectual capacity of children (Bouchard et al. 2011). Manganese is an essential element and the human body can efficiently regulate the uptake of it from food – but not from drinking water. This probably reflects that the use of groundwater from deeper strata containing dissolved manganese is a rather new phenomenon in the history of mankind. In Bangladesh this is still another factor to consider. It seems that the driller´s strategy is still possible to use even when taking into account that manganese levels should not be excessive. The findings regarding the effect of manganese in drinking water will have global implications, as todays permissible limits set by WHO and in different countries including Sweden do not take into consideration the health aspects.

Reference
Bouchard et al. (2011) Environmental Health Perspectives 119: 138-143.
Robinson et al. (2011) Applied Geochemistry 26: 624-635.       
 

Skeptical, critical, or despairing observers of the recent Rio+20 mega-sustainability-marathon are overlooking some surprisingly good news. No, Rio did not deliver a fantastic new international agreement to transform global civilization. What it *did* produce was a solid, global-scale reflection of the current state of the global sustainability movement - and the conclusion is, global transformation is already well under way.

This positive interpretation is a far cry from what one hears coming from most activist voices. But I am prepared to defend this claim on the merits of the much-criticized "outcome document" alone, though I also have powerful anecdotal evidence from friends who went to Rio. (I did not; it collided with Swedish midsummer.)

Activist voices were highly critical of Rio+20. Greenpeace leaders spoke of "war," documents were symbolically burned, etc. But as Denmark's charismatic Environment Minister Ida Auken put it recently, "NGOs need to get out of the disappointment business." (She said that during a planned interruption of my recent keynote speech to European policy makers on sustainable development, a group that really needed a lift post-Rio. For more on that speech and conference, see www.sd-network.eu)

Let's just look at the Green Economy. Mostly, one hears that the world's nations could not agree on what a Green Economy was -- some want more "Green," some want more "Economy" -- and that they battered their way to a watered-down text about it.

In my view, the text on Green Economy in the Rio+20 outcome text, called "The Future We Want" ("TFWW"), is an example of successful global negotiation. Green Economy retained a prominent role in TFWW. And better yet, it is clearly (though still only partially) defined by the global community for the first time. TFWW includes a statement of fifteen very specific principles intended to guide Green Economy policy making. If you look at previous international documentation around Green Economy -- running to hundreds of pages of contradictions and contestations by dozens of actors -- this specificity in TFWW represents an amazing breakthrough in international diplomacy.

Of course, I personally wish those principles included reference to the biophysical limits of Planet Earth, such as the use of fresh water, addressing climate change, or the preservation of biodiversity. They don't. But they do include (Paragraph 58, principle "o") the idea that Green Economy -- while also meeting legal, social, and poverty-reduction critieria -- should "promote sustainable consumption and production patterns." As long as you actually know that the word "sustainable" must include these things, you'll know what to do to create a real Green Economy.

Other positive elements of Rio+20's TFWW outcome include the first-ever global public endorsement, by the national governments of planet Earth, of concepts like Life-Cycle Assessment, Sustainable Design, corporate social responsibility and sustainability reporting, and the adoption of a new plan for promoting sustainable consumption and production over the next ten years. That's an amazing list ... and it's a partial one.

Just compare that specificity to the abstractions of Rio+0 in 1992, or Jo-berg in 2002, and what you'll see is global recognition that we are in the midst of a global transformation. Sustainable development has finally become the new normal.

(Yes, I know, "water" does not show up until paragraph 109, and soft calls for "significantly improv[ing] the implementation of integrated water resources management" do not excite deep feeling. But water's all over the place in TFWW, both directly, and indirectly:  there can be no Green Economy without sustainable management of water resources, for example.)

So, watchers of Rio, don't despair. I was delighted to see some of my more optimistic NGO, research, business, and consultancy friends -- I am not alone in this -- come back from Rio on a high (certainly compared to my government friends). Sure, the mood near the UN process was sour, they say. But elsewhere, they saw evidence of dynamic engagement, people taking initiative and embracing responsibility, a great outpouring of innovation. "I really feel that a global transformation is under way," said a German friend who heads a major center on these issues.

If I stop listening to the disappointment brokers, and just read the actual Rio+20 text with an historic, 20-year perspective, and think about how far we've come, and listen to the reports from my friends who talked with so many other friends about all the wonderful things that are actually happening in this world ... then I feel it, too.

-- Alan AtKisson is a consultant and writer working in sustainability since 1988. He is CEO of AtKisson Inc., president of the ISIS Academy, and co-president of the Balaton Group. He lives in Stockholm.
 

As the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro in June approaches, human rights experts and civil society organisations are disappointed about the lack of attention to human rights in the negotiations. The latest draft for the Rio+20 statement does include a reference to the human right to water and sanitation, but it remains contested. In an open letter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation, Catarina de Albuquerque, reminds the governments going to Rio that this right is essential for the full enjoyment of life and other human rights. She strongly calls on States to recommit to the human right to water and sanitation at Rio+20 in order to achieve sustainable development that places people at the centre.

This is not a call for new positions. The struggle at this point is more to maintain the support for a human right that has already been recognized under international law, in order not to start moving backwards on the issue. Therefore it is vital to keep explicitly referring to the human right to water and sanitation in the document, in order to prioritize the under-served and to ensure non-discrimination. There are also fears that the recognition of sanitation as central for human dignity and sustainable development will be lost in the negotiations. The UN special rapporteur therefore calls for an inclusion for sanitation in the Sustainable Development Goals, just as sanitation is already part of the current Millennium Development Goals efforts.

The Special Rapporteur's open letter reiterates what the key features of the right are: "A sustainable development target for water and sanitation should aim at achieving access to safe and affordable drinking water and sanitation for all without discrimination, in sufficient quantities to protect human health and dignity, particularly for the most marginalized."

Taking a broader perspective, 200 African NGOs in the NGO Forum preceding the 51st session of the African Commission on Human and People's Rights (ACHPR) issued a joint resolution in calling for a strengthened national resources governance framework in compliance with human rights principles and harmonizing minimum standards. The NGO Forum agreed that governments in Rio should reiterate that all legal frameworks governing natural resources, including  use and pollution of water resources for industrial purposes, should comply with human rights commitments and ensure human rights, prior, free and informed consent for the protection of customary rights, access to information for empowerment, and participation for sustainable and equitable outcomes.

The international organisation Freshwater Action Network joins the choir of civil society organizations applauding the UN Special Rapporteur’s open letter and states that “Now, on the first day of the third round of ‘informal informals, we are calling loud and clear with a united voice: States must recommit to the human right to water and sanitation to achieve true sustainable development.”

Informal discussions in preparation for Rio+20 are taking place this week.

References

1. Resolution by NGO Forum to the Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights
2. Open letter by the Special Rapporteur
3. Statement by Freshwater Action Network
    

A year and a half ago I wrote my first sanitation blog on the cholera crisis in Haiti. Today the epidemic is on-going and getting worse. This month the Pan American Health Organization estimated the disease could strike 200,000-250,000 Haitian this year. More than 7,000 have already died from the disease. Efforts to control the outbreak have been patchwork and investments slim as aid organization are beginning to leave. The solution is of course investment in adequate sanitation and water systems, estimated at a price of US$1 billion. This is small portion of the billions that were pledged to Haiti following the earthquake, but contributions have flagged as attention from the crisis fades.

Unfortunately, this situation is typical. It often takes a tragedy or a crisis for a problem to make the headlines and stimulate action to correct the situation. Yet what about the quiet tragedies that happen on a daily basis which no one seems to notice? When news becomes old or repetitive we tune it out. How many of you have heard the statistics on children mortality linked to lack of proper sanitation (millions of deaths per year) so often that you hardly react to it anymore?

One of the major challenges in the sanitation sector is making it a priority issue - for households as well as politicians. I am convinced that part of the solution will be finding a way to bring sanitation issues into the limelight on a more regular basis. Getting more press coverage does not always need to be negative. Many organizations in the sector are already using media tactics. Football stars support WASH campaigns (for water, sanitation & hygiene) around the world and this month the Bollywood actress, Vidya Balan, was named India's sanitation brand ambassador. Another Indian woman made the news when she threatened to divorce her newly-wed husband because he lacked a toilet. In March this year, she received a cash reward and the "Sulabh Sanitation Award" by the Union Minster for Rural Development.

People need to hear the sanitation news - both the bad and good. The only way to break a taboo is by talking about it. This can be done at high levels, like the Ministerial delegations that were assembled by the global partnership Sanitation and Water for All (SWA) last month to raise spending commitments for improved sanitation and water. Yet, it can also be done at a grass-roots level through local media, editorials, social-networking sites, and sharing stories at a personal level. We need to keep reminding ourselves of the importance of sanitation so that it is not quietly forgotten.

Maybe you have a catchy slogan to help get the issue stuck in people's heads?  The Sanitation Drive to 2015 seeks to support and inspire people to take action towards achieving the sanitation MDG. They need a slogan - submit your idea on their website (http://www.sanitationdrive2015.org/).

Everybody wants greener cities. It makes sense for a lot of reasons: Greenery helps infiltration and reduces flood problems, it lowers air temperatures and thus alleviates the heat island effect, reduces noise and improves air quality, and when producing food it can bring down transport needs and feed the urban poor. Above all - green is beautiful!

But how far should the greening of the city go? Is there a point when the urban becomes rural and loses its urban advantage? Will not too much greenery contribute to urban sprawl and increase the intra-urban need for transport? Is it wise to use expensively treated drinking water to irrigate plants? And is urban agriculture really feeding the poor, or is it a side-line business of the already well-off?

Urban agriculture can become acutely important in times of crisis, as noted for example in present-day Greece. Newspapers report about people growing food on their balconies, or moving to the countryside, to enjoy a more peaceful life and nutritional security, as well as finding new ways to connect producers and consumers more directly like in the ‘Potato Revolution.’  This becomes a necessity when people lose jobs and incomes, thus facing real difficulties in acquiring enough food for themselves and their dependants.

There is a long urban history of acquiring food outside of markets: Allotment gardening accompanied the early urbanization and industrialization in Europe, with local authorities, charities and industry providing land for families to garden. This was originally conceived as a way to provide supplementary food and income for the urban poor and thereby reduce malnutrition. After the World Wars, urban agriculture has mainly been associated with community and ecological movements, and more recently as a way to combat climate change and to improve quality of life. 

Urban agriculture is a prominent feature of many lower-income cities. In Cuba, the collapse of Soviet support along with US trade embargo boosted self-sufficiency and urban agriculture during the 1990s. The movement seems to sustain itself, with popular and private gardens in Havana organically producing around half of the fruits and vegetables consumed in the city.  Several cities around the world are claimed to have similarly high shares of vegetable or poultry produced within city limits.

Agriculture, however, requires space. Allotment gardening and similar land uses are facing stark competition for land from commercial and residential uses. Recognizing the importance of urban agriculture for the local economy, researchers at the Ardhi University in Tanzania are calling for zoning laws to set aside land for agriculture within cities.  Allotment gardening is seen as a model in many parts of the world.

Another response to the shortage of urban land for greenery has been the green wall or vertical gardening. Swedish Gus Nilsson in Gaborone, Botswana, was behind the development of a system of intensive horticulture for dry tropical areas, based on walls with built-in containers, where tomatoes grow with roof-top harvested rain-water. The green wall trend has been taken to new heights in Mexico City where the (Nissan-sponsored) NGO VERDEMX has installed three eco-sculptures; combining art with environmental benefits like reducing particles and noise (although plants don’t always thrive in the harsh environment of Mexico City’s traffic). 

Roof-top gardening is another way to manage the competition for land, and reportedly it has significant effects on the local air temperature. On a typical day, the temperature of Chicago City Hall roof - holding a near 2000 square metre garden with some 20,000 plants - is almost 40°C cooler than neighbouring conventional (tar) roofs.  Whereas the Chicago City Hall roof-top garden is not for pedestrians, the re-entry of greenery in built-up areas may have its main value in human comfort and quality of life. (But only as long as accessibility and security can be maintained in a way as to provide a green lung for urban dwellers of all ages and genders!)

As discussed at the beginning: Urban agriculture as a fall-back during times of crisis is unquestionable. It is also claimed that where women have the main responsibility for feeding families, a family garden is crucial for making that non-market contribution to food security in the household. The extent to which it benefits the urban poor can be questioned. Gardens are often more common among the middle- or upper classes:  When I lived in Dar es Salaam during the 90s, the Prime Minister’s garden was full of cows, and chicken were traded by professionals at the university as well as UN agencies. Urban agriculture very much appeared to belong to the upper income echelons.

A major benefit of greening the cities nevertheless remains: Beauty. This was wonderfully echoed in Pablo Gutman’s study of the potential of agriculture for self-consumption as a way to improve nutrition among the urban poor in Buenos Aires: The poor woman hesitates to harvest her vegetables “because they look so pretty and smell so nice.”  Is this the chief benefit of greening our cities? I believe so!
 

The Nile Basin stands at a crossroads. It will not be able to feed its growing population and support a rising urban middle-class by focusing on current water practices only. Instead, a comprehensive basin development approach must be chosen, involving rainfed and irrigated agriculture, the importation of food, and the development of an export-oriented service and industrial sector to pay for the imported food. The Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) and a future Nile River Basin Commission (NRBC) are in a unique position to help secure a future where more food is grown with less water, where all people have enough to eat and a growing economy contributes to export earnings.

In a study entitled "NBI Core Agricultural Functions Study: Proposed framework, options and functions for a NBI/Nile River Basin Commission Agricultural Agenda" and carried out by a Ramboll Natura  - Stockholm International Water Institute consortium in 2011, the future of NBI/NRBC in promoting agriculture in the basin is presented. The report will be made available at www.nilebasin.org in the near future.

The report initially reviews the global experience of river basin organizations engaged in promoting agriculture. The conclusion is that this hardly ever happens - river basin organizations focus on hydropower, environment and water sharing, not agriculture. Following this is a review of the different roles that NBI/NRBC can take in promoting agriculture; to facilitate basin processes, implement own activities, support other organizations with expertise and information, and act as a lobbyist.     

However, the main thrust of the report is on four categories of "core agricultural functions" that NBI/NRBC can provide. These are:

1. policy formulation and cooperation;
2. knowledge management;
3. basin development; and
4. market development.

Each category consists of some 4-5 sub-functions. To single out one specific function per category: it is proposed that a policy should be developed on "water and agriculture standards", i.e. the standards that unite the basin in terms of e.g. water quality or water use efficiency; to promote "agricultural research and knowledge management"; to "facilitate project preparations", i.e. to assist in reaching agreements and secure funding for new projects; and "marketing/promotion of agricultural trade". The report ends with a review of the drivers that may shape food and water security and agricultural development opportuni¬ties in the Nile basin in the short, medium, and long-term.

The topic of the report is obviously of great interest. All around the world is "basin management" being promoted as the new and beneficial alternative to conventional water management according to political or administrative units. But the key question still remains to be answered - how is food production enhanced by having a transboundary basin organisation engaged in agriculture? This study indicates that a number of such potential "functions" exist - a focus on e.g. increased land and water productivity, a support to ecological functions, and to turn food production increasingly commercial - but we still need to see them successfully implemented. A strong theme throughout the report is the argument that since a basin agreement is today in the making, an opportunity also exists in moving from national food self-sufficiency to basin food security.    

The main theme for the 6th World Water Forum was "Time for solutions" and one of the sub-themes dealt with at the thematic sessions was "Respond to climate and global changes in an urbanizing world". The sub-themes under the 6th World Water Forum were, however, not only themes developed and discussed at the Forum as such, but they were prepared during an ongoing process initiated after the 5th WWF in Istanbul 2009 and leading up to the 6th WWF. The process concerned the Water and Climate-theme identified that water management would require holistic and multidisciplinary responses to the increasingly complex challenges, including those linked to responses to climate and global changes. Hence, under the theme seven different targets were identified with different target-and-solution-group coordinators, which would all contribute to the process.

The issue of Water and Climate Change was debated and discussed during high level political round tables, such as the closed session on "Adaptation to Climate Change" convened by the National Water Commission of Mexico, CONAGUA, the Jordan Ministry of Water and Irrigation, and the Portuguese Ministry of Agriculture, Sea, Environment and Spatial Planning. This Roundtable resulted in a set of Recommendations on

• Improving water governance horizontally as well as vertically;
• Improving water management financing, including by a mainstreaming of funding strategies; and
• The need to ensure for decision making under uncertainty, in combination with no regrets strategies as key components of the enabling environment to manage water resources.

The three convening countries and other stakeholders “commit to build the consensus and outcomes of this roundtable into ongoing processes, such as the UNFCCC and the Rio+20 Conference”.

One of the high level panels was “Water Debate: Increasing Resilience to Climate Change: What is the Role of Water Storage”, which included panelists Maria Mutagamba, Minister of Water and Environment, Uganda, Gabriel Azavedo, Director of Sustainability, Odebrecht Energy, Brazil, and Rachel Kyte, Vice President for Sustainable Development, World Bank and the former key water person at the World Bank and one of the initiators to the World Commissions on Dams, now professor of Environmental Engineering at Harvard University, John Briscoe. The panel discussed the role of man-made water storage as part of a solution for building resilience to changing water futures. However, the discussions revealed not very much of new suggestions.

There were also side events, such as the one on “Improving Water Resources Management Through the Global Framework for Climate Services /GFCS)” convened by WMO, and regional sessions such as the one convened by the Korea Water Forum on "Water Education Center for Sustainable Future: Meeting Challenges of Climate Change in Northeast Asia", and the session by Inter-American Development Bank and Mexico National Water Commission (CONAGUA): "Top-Down or Bottom-Up Approaches to Water-Based Climate Change Adaptation in the Americas: the 'Chicken and Egg' Syndrome", all discussing suggested solutions to water adaptation to climate change. Also the high level roundtable on the "Future of Water Desalination" suggested more concrete solutions.

Among the key events under the thematic sessions on "Respond to climate and global changes in an urbanizing world" was the one on "Building Blocks for Integrating Water into the Climate Regime - Raising the Profile of Water in the Global Climate Discourse" convened by Water and Climate Coalition/SIWI. This session, with contributions from among others Freshwater Action Network, CONAGUA Mexico, BRAC University Bangladesh, UNFCCC secretariat and the Unit for Adaptation to Climate Change, EC, in a panel discussion convened by Karin Lexén, SIWI, agreed that water expertise needs to be represented where decisions are made. The chairperson to the UNECE Convention on the 'Protection and Use of Transboundary Watercourses and International Lakes', suggested that as that convention is now open also for partners outside UNECE, its third workshop on "Water and Adaptation to Climate Change in Transboundary Basins: Making adaptation work" to be held in Geneva, 25-26 April 2012 might be a useful opportunity for following-up and intensifying the discussions towards a more pertinent place for water on the UNFCCC agenda.

On March 6th of this year the Joint Monitoring program of UNICEF and the World Health Organization announced that the world has met the MDG target of halving the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water. Yet, the same report highlights that the world is still far from meeting the sanitation target and is unlikely to do so by 2015. According to the report, only 63% of the world has access to improved sanitation, well below the target goal of 75%. Without a significant change in the rate that sanitation in delivered, it will take until 2026 until the sanitation target is met.

So the pressure is on to find solutions and new approaches. In fact, that is the theme of the World Water Forum held in Marseille. The conference organizers have started a webpage where people can post their solutions and even gather votes and feedback (http://www.solutionsforwater.org/. The solutions for sanitation include, increasing the capacity of system operators, backing the human right to sanitation, planted wetlands for biomass production, public education and awareness-raising, empowering young people as change leaders, strengthening women’s roles, decentralized treatment options, and pro-poor financing schemes. Nearly 150 sanitation solutions have been submitted. What is striking about the list is how few of the solutions are technology-based. The majority have to do with providing an “enabling environment” for positive behavior change, pro-active politics and increased affordability. Where there are technical solutions, they tend to focus on the potential for reuse of water and nutrients or gaining energy through biogas or biofuel.

To me the message in this is quite strong - sanitation does not stand alone. The solutions to reaching global sanitation coverage must be integrated into the web of society and its use of resources. Sanitation is not a “thing” that can be packaged and sold like the latest cell phone or pills to cure malaria. It is essentially about hygiene habits and attitudes towards cleanliness. It is a state of being that is created through education and behavior change. Yet, it is also about the management of physical waste streams; waste that is increasingly recognized as a potential resource. The solution to global sanitation thus lies in fostering the values of sanitation and linking it directly to economic gains.

There are of course huge challenges remaining in how to do this on a global scale. But like many changes, it can also start small - with individual changes. It starts with the education of our children; teaching them to appreciate a clean restroom, to pick up trash, to use the toilet properly. It starts with consumers using biogas from wastewater treatment and demanding produce fertilized with recycled nutrients. It starts with citizens pushing their representatives for more closed-loop options that increase resource efficiency in waste management, and supporting the export of these ideas to the areas that need them most. It starts with a global movement and dialogue about the value of sanitation.

Many natural disasters that involve calamities such as droughts, floods and earth quakes result in internationally supported recovery assistance. This is particularily true when the national efforts are unable to cope with the situation. Recovery activities that focus on food security, such as those currently found in Ethiopia, are mostly oriented and limited towards seed and tool distribution, potentially also topped up with some food assistance (The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies). While such support may be appropriate and can serve to support immidiate needs and short term recovery, it rarely addresses the root causes to the crisis. It is often only a matter of time until the same population face another crisis of similar nature.

It is imperative to understand the root causes to a crisis in order to provide appropriate support. And with the modern age of access to more and better information, emergency response operations have never been better equipped to target the real, identified root causes to a crisis and thus contribute to long-term, resilience building (World Disasters Report 2010). It is also vital for post-disaster responses to strengthen and support the survivors' own organizations.
However, reality looks different. The big donor’s funding is rarely sufficient in neither amount nor flexibility. Humanitarian emergency operations are often limited to immediate needs - they rarely stretch beyond a year - and they are unable to address the many drivers that are behind a particular crisis. As an example, in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, after the 2004 tsunami, with international aid under pressure to spend and to build, many buildings were put up, but when construction was finished and aid agencies withdrew, communities were left with no source of income, no social cohesion and little support for the future.  

If adequate time is spent to analyse and understand the root causes to e.g. a lack of food, in particular when it is related to droughts and climate change, improved land, water and nutrient management can be addressed. Water availability is key for a stable production and in turn also a prerequisite to encourage further investments in the production. But that requires farming systems that are water efficient, productive and resilient. To reduce the risk in farming is key to sucess.

Looking into the future, the funding time-frames to humanitarian emergencies must be extended. That will allow for a proper analysis of the root causes of a crisis and to take a broader, long-term problem solving approach to the crisis, as opposed to today’s short-term, sectorial and segmented response (Department of Cooperative Governance, RSA; UNICEF). There is also a need to coordinate inbetween the different donor organisations – there were at lest some 45 different organisations providing emergency assitance to the Horn of Africa crisis last year, many focusing on water-related support (The Nightly News, 26 September 2011). It is highly questionable if this is the most appropriate approach to address a complex, partly drought-driven crisis.

by Dr Patrick Fox

References:

• IFRC
• World Disasters Report 2010
• The Nightly News
• Department of Cooperative Governance, Republic of South Africa
• UNICEF

Urban dwellers in general enjoy better health and higher incomes than rural inhabitants. Yet, the squalid sanitary conditions of many high-density, low-income informal settlements forfeit the urban advantage. In the urban slums where dwellings lack toilets and where water and waste management is unreliable or ineffective; daily life becomes cumbersome, inconvenient and undignified. Children suffer the consequences through debilitating diarrheal disease.

The high cost for society induced by the lack of sanitation has been diligently calculated and the corresponding social and economic benefits of investing in sanitation quantified by the WSP Economics of Sanitation Program (1).

For actually putting resources into sanitation, you however need to resolve; who is to pay? How much? For what? And how? A welcome contribution to this challenge is the recent IRC report Sanitation Financing Models for the Urban Poor (2) which sorts out the variegated institutional arrangements to finance different urban sanitation options. The report reviews the ways in which the private citizens and others (e.g. national and local government, NGOs, external donors) have (co-) financed different sanitation solutions, with their respective advantages and disadvantages. Naturally, there is not one solution, nor need there be. There are many modalities which can be made to work better, including through more systematic sharing of lessons learned in the sanitation sector.

A more specific finding worth highlighting in relation to the urban poor is that the pay-per-use, being the most common way to finance (recurrent costs of) public or communal toilets in low-income areas, will never be able to make away with open defecation. The poorest people will never be able to pay to use a toilet, and certainly not for all household members and at all times. While paying for each visit may be suitable for busy commercial areas, for low-income more residential areas, an alternative to the pay-per-use could be a monthly flat rate for the use of toilets as well as washing and laundry facilities.

The monthly subscription model is reportedly preferred by SPARC, an Indian NGO that has supported community-designed, built and managed toilet blocks serving hundreds of thousands of poor urban dwellers. Their experience also highlights the contentious issue of securing land for communal facilities (3) and the importance of working closely with communities and supporting their incremental organization - including the power of women's groups, as well as "the art of gentle negotiation" - in order to get reluctant urban governments involved (4).

In crowded slum areas, individual household toilets are often not an option because of lack of space, house ownership or sheer poverty. Shared facilities may in such situation be the most viable way forward. However, where densities are lower, household installations may be plausible for providing basic sanitation for the urban poor.

In Durban - now a renowned success story on extending sanitation and water services to all - the municipality pays parts of the cost of installing urine diverting toilets and hygiene promotion (5). With a grant from the Gates Foundation, nutrients are being extracted from the urine as a way of turning waste into a resource (6). If business plans become successful, this could provide a much-needed financial incentive to help increase sanitation coverage. In any case, there is the potential of closing the urban nutrient cycle.

Different sanitation technologies and institutional arrangements have different requirements in terms of land, money and water availability. (Urban) sanitation blogger Duncan Mara (7) is concerned about the relative costs of different solutions, and often argues for the cost-effectiveness of condominial sewerage for high-density periurban areas (Mara & Alabaster). These systems, a form of simplified sewerage based on the sharing of smaller-diameter piping at relatively flat gradients, are considerably cheaper than conventional sewers. Still, the condominial systems rely on water and sanitation cooperatives and thus the ability of communities to organize to manage shared facilities. And, all sewerage engineering needs to be correctly done.

Urban sanitation systems are complex, and without appreciating the whole, certain parts are easily neglected. The report on Sanitation Financing Models (2) found that the costs for excreta transport and final disposal were not given sufficient attention in the planning and budgeting. Needless to say, without all its parts coming together, the system will not serve its users well.

With great humility to the task, we need to mobilize funds, expertise and urban land along with the insights, engagements and priorities of low-income communities. Rather than allowing 'cholera' to be dubbed 'the best of all sanitary reformers' - governments should take a resolute lead in this collective concern for the health and dignity of its citizens. 

References

1. WSP (2012) "Economics of Sanitation Initiative" Water and Sanitation Program
2. Sijbesma, C. (2011)Sanitation financing models for the urban poor. IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre, The Hague.
3. Making Urban Sanitation Safe and Fair. World Water Week Side Event 2011-08-21, convened by SHARE Consortium, International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI), London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and WaterAid
4. Burra, S., Patel, S. and Kerr, T. (2003) Community-designed, built and managed toilet blocks in Indian cities. Environment and Urbanization. 15(2):11-32.
5. Gounden, T., B. Pfaff, et al. (2006). Provision of Free Sustainable Basic Sanitation: The Durban Experience. 32nd WEDC International Conference. Colombo, Sri Lanka, WEDC: 4.
6. Frederikse, J. (2011) "South Africa: Harvesting nutrients that are flushed away." all.Africa.com, 28 June 2011.
7. Mara, D. (2012) "S a n i t a t i o n. Personal and fairly maverick views on how international sanitation targets can be achieved."
8. Mara, D. and Alabaster, G. (2008) A new paradigm for low-cost urban water supplies and sanitation in developing countries. Water Policy. 10:119-129.

2011 was the year when the UN Human Rights Council took the human right to water and sanitation one step further, with recommendations on how to realize it. Does it mean that in 2012 the battle is over and that it is now "only" up to authorities to start realizing this right? Or, should I say rights? In fact, the distinction between whether this is one or two rights shows that there are still important debates to be held at the global level.

The UN special rapporteur Catarina de Albuquerque has since her appointment constantly highlighted the right to sanitation, attempting to lift it out of the shadow of the water issue. International organizations and UN agencies have campaigned successfully since the 2008 International Year of Sanitation to break the taboo of sanitation issues so that we can talk frankly of the vital need to have a safe place to pee and poo. But in a legal sense, the right to water and sanitation has often been treated as one combined right. The UN human rights resolution from 2011 (A/HRC/RES/18/1), talks of "the right to safe drinking water and sanitation" - in singular.

Amnesty international however emphasizes that while the Human Rights Council appears to be treating water and sanitation as a single combined right, Amnesty International's view is that water and sanitation are two linked human rights. Amnesty's research from Nairobi's slum areas shows that women have to choose between not using a toilet at night or going to a public toilet and risking sexual violence - thereby pointing to specific problems related to a lack of sanitation and claiming it should be recognized as a distinct right.

Indeed it can be misleading to automatically connect sanitation rights with a right to water, for example there are many forms of dry sanitation that do not and should not require water. But perhaps what defines sanitation more than many other human rights issues, is the concept of human dignity that it evokes. For half of the world’s population, sanitation issues also include how to safely and hygienically manage menstruation. Within the sanitation field, this subject has so far been quite invisible and, in many countries, a taboo within the taboo as it were.

Menstruation management - the new taboo to break
Sanitation is crucial for the health and survival of men, women and children. But some of the most serious aspects of sanitation are more relevant to women and girls, and menstruation management is one of them. Menstruation is taboo in many countries, but the difficulty to manage it under poor living conditions have serious impacts on a woman's health as well as her social and economic conditions. Because access to separate toilets is lacking, approximately 30% of girls from poorer communities in South Africa do not attend school during menstruation. So not only do separate toilets at school enable girls to attend school in the first place, but more girls are likely to stay after puberty and during menstruation periods to complete their education.

Ms. de Albuquerque stresses, however, that "better sanitation conditions will not be achieved simply by building latrines and sanitary tanks". In her view, real changes in hygiene standards are only possible if the population is fully sensitized about improved hygiene practices. To this end, the South African Water Research Commission (WRC) in 2011 arranged a dialogue on menstrual management in support of the Sanitary Dignity Campaign for Women and Girls. In a report made together with The Department for Women, Children and People with Disabilities, Stockholm Environment Institute and the Water Information Network South Africa, the commission shows that 60% of women and girls in South Africa do not have access to traditional sanitary ware (pads and tampons). Forced to use "alternatives" such as rags, toilet paper, newspaper, leaves, "recycled" tampons / pads and disposable nappies. This has dire consequences for women's and girls' health and hygiene, productivity, as well as dignity - and, as the report concludes, confidence to be active members of a society.

Future steps within this field will be for the UN system to clearly define whether the right to sanitation should be singled out s a right on its own. Another challenge for the UN as well as for development partners will be to continue lifting menstruation management out of the shadows and integrating appropriate measures in development programming.

References

• Women and girls and their right to sanitation - press release by UN special rapporteur
• World Toilet Day - press release by UN special rapporteur
• Report of the UN special rapporteur Ms. De Albuquerque on sanitation
• Menstrual hygiene management report, Water Research Commission

Investments for improving sanitation can mean big money. Within the past monthin Romania, a US$70 million sewerage treatment plant in Braila was opened and anotherUS$47 million projectlaunched to build a large wastewatertreatment station in Constanta County. The sewage treatment plant in Fallujah, Iraq has so far cost US$108 million and is due for completion in 2014.In Africa, a World Bank sanitation project for $30 million was approved for Cameroon in June 2011.

While this may sound like lots of money, it is important to keep everything in perspective. Spending on sanitation is generally a fraction of 1% of national budgets and barely registers on many donor budgets. Yet, lack of sanitation is one of the most wide spread health problems of our time (in addition to causing environmental degradation). Every year, 1.8 million people die from diarrheal diseases related to poor sanitation. In terms of illness, fecal-borne diseases result in the loss of 82 million disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) per year. In sub-Saharan Africa, half the hospital beds on average are occupied by people with fecal-borne disease, which consumes 12% of national health budgets. The WaterAid report "Fatal Neglect - How Health Systems are Failing to Comprehensively Address Child Mortality" (2009) potently showed how both HIV/AIDS and malaria receive significantly more funding even though they cause fewer deaths (see figure below).

Yet, at the same time we know that sanitation is important and economically viable. A recent poll conducted by the British Medical Journal voted sanitation the greatestmedical advance of the past 166 years. A number of studies have shown that investments in sustainable sanitation bring an average return of US$ 8.1 for every US$1 invested. So, why this neglect of sanitation by municipal, national and international decision-makers?

Research by the World Bank Water and Sanitation Program that came out this year (The Political Economy of Sanitation) suggest that the current limited focus on sanitation is driven largely by political motivation in the context of competing demands for resources, and to a lesser extent by technical or economic considerations.In some ways this is good news. Political motivation is something that can be influenced. We as global citizens can stop considering sanitation as a taboo subject and raise the issue as a serious debate. We as tax-payers, donors, social activists and individuals can put sanitation on the table by lifting the issue in our daily conversations, our votes, and our donations. Increasing awareness increases the chances that priorities will shift and the needed investments will be made.

Transboundary water management (TWM) is a relatively new scientific field and does as such receive much attention - including a need to learn across basin borders. In other words, it is common to make use of case studies, undertake study tours and make thematic reviews of transboundary basins. This type of learning carries a positive notch of working together and adds on to our global knowledge. But does it actually work? Can lessons learned in e.g. the Mekong be transferred to the Nile and the La Plata and still make sense?     

There are many organisations that offer extensively described and analysed cases of water management from around the world. For example, the Global Water Partnership has its Toolbox on water management, the World Water Assessment Program provides a huge number of case studies on www.unesco.org/water/wwap, private sector Veolia Water contributes on www.veoliawater.com/solutions/case-studies, and Twin2Go offers its “best guidelines” on www.twin2go.eu. An objective of the latter is to “draw context-sensitive but transferable approaches for improving adaptive water resources management”. 

I have in recent months been involved in two cases where far away river basins and their water management have been studied and attempts have been made to transfer their lessons learned to basins in the Middle East and North Africa. First, as part of an assignment for the Nile Basin Initiative, a review was undertaken of international river basin organizations and their agriculture agendas, either as desk reviews or by actually visiting the areas. But to collect information that was both transferable and made sense to the Nile basin context was not easy… What we collected was sometimes not adequately focused and so context-specific that the lessons learned were difficult to share. It helped to visit the basins, to get a better in-depth understanding of the issues, but that required much time, efforts and money.

The second case is the Sida supported and Ramboll-SIWI implemented training programmes on international water management (www.rambollnatura.se / www.siwi.org). Some of these programmes have focused on the Middle East and we have made extensive use of case studies - e.g. on the Nile, Mekong, Baltic Sea, Danube and Orange - with the purpose of transferring lessons learned to the Middle East and rivers like the Euphrates, Tigris and Jordan. But again, what is being transferred? It is always interesting for a group of water professionals to listen to well-presented cases from faraway places. But are the things they learn applicable back home? As quoted above, is it possible to transfer “context-sensitive” approaches?

I believe it is difficult but not impossible to do so. But it requires a carefully planned process, with high levels of engagement and well-defined issues. It is a four-folded process: to make a thorough analysis of the original basin context; to review the relevant water management issues existing; to define the unique relationship that exists between context and issues; and to transfer and carefully adapt the issues of value into the new context. The adaptation is only (?) possible when the original relationship between context and issues is well understood. This is the approach that we have followed in the Sida supported training programmes. We have used a specifically appointed facilitator - knowing both transboundary water management and the region into which the lessons learned are applied - to guide the participants through the presented case studies.

Another reportedly successful exercise of transferring knowledge can be exemplified by the Phnom Penh Water Supply Authority in Cambodia, which at the onset of its now well-renowned restructuring went on a study tour of other water utilities in Asia. The team from Phnom Penh worked hard and meticulously analysed what they saw and what they could bring home, and - most importantly - how to adapt it to their local situation. Inspired by this, the knowledge management plan implemented by the UNDP Water Governance Facility at SIWI for MDG-F supported initiatives uses basically three questions in picking up lessons from case studies and transferring between programmes: what can we learn from this?, what do we bring home?, and how do we adapt this to our home situation?

As a conclusion, as long as we are aware of and respect the difficulties involved in learning from cases located far away, and base the transfer of knowledge on an appropriate and carefully designed process, we should certainly cross boundaries to learn from others. 
 

During the recently concluded UNFCCC COP17 meeting in Durban, water was, partly as a result of intensive and excellent work by the Water and Climate Coalition and several other groups, included as part of the Nairobi Work Programme (NWP). In November 2011, at the request of parties, the UNFCCC Secretariat produced a technical paper on water and climate change impacts and adaptation strategies, to support the integration of water into adaptation action under the NWP. This paper served as a background document to the deliberations. Climate and Water issues were dealt with at two different official sessions: on December 1st at the Joint SBSTA/SBI (the Subsidiary Body for Implementation) workshop to "consider the outcomes of the Nairobi work programme, to highlight the scientific, technical and socio-economic aspects of impacts, vulnerability and adaptation to climate change most relevant to the SBI" (FCCC/SBSTA/2011/CRP.1), and at the SBSTA session December 3rd when the Agenda item3, the Nairobi work programme was deliberated (FCCC/SBSTA/2011/L.26/Add.1).

At the SBSTA/SBI workshop parties highlighted both the importance of focusing on "sectoral approaches" where water, health and food security were specifically mentioned, and also the need for guidance "to consider trade-offs between sectors in the light of scarce resources" where allocation of water was specifically mentioned. The SBSTA, responding to the proposals and contributions made by parties, including written contributions¹, requested the secretariat to organize in cooperation with other relevant organizations, a technical workshop, before the thirty-seventh session of SBSTA on water and climate change impacts and adaptation strategies.

Among the most important Side events from a water and climate perspective was of course the Water, Climate and Development Day on December 3rd. The African Ministers Council on Water, AMCOW, in conjunction with the African Union Commission (AUC), the African Development Bank, AfDB, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, UNECA, the Department of Water Affairs,  DWA South Africa, the Global Water Partnership, GWP, and the Water and Climate Coalition (WCC) organised the Water, Climate and Development Day as well as the High Level session that presented the key findings of the day to ministers and dignitaries to take into the Conference of the Parties’ High-Level segment.

The Water, Climate and Development Day that dealt with issues such as "Global Policy Solutions for Adaptation and Mitigation", "Infrastructure, Technical and Ecosystem Solutions", "Climate Change Information for Water Resources", and "Financial and Institutional Solutions", delivered during the day and at the High Level segment several key messages. Among these are the following action oriented messages of particular importance to the continuous intergovernmental UNFCCC-process:
 

• "Water knowledge expertise needs to inform the Adaptation Committee to ensure linkages between Nairobi Work Programme and the Cancun Agreement, emphasising importance of water as a key medium for adaptation. Qualified water resource management knowledge should be represented amongst the members of the Adaptation Committee. In addition links should be established between the Adaptation Committee and water institutions and organisation.
• We welcome the SBSTA draft decision to organise a technical workshop on water. This can be further strengthened by establishing a thematic focus under the Nairobi Work Programme, ensuring that climate interventions involving water resources are properly addressed.
• Establish water as a priority under the Green Climate Fund with a sub thematic funding window for water resources management.
• The Africa Green fund should include a dedicated thematic funding window for water resources and to be utilised for projects related to water management and climate change adaptation and mitigation."

Reference:
1. Such as the "Opinion of Republic of Uzbekistan on the research and systematic observations" in which they mention "assessment of performance of measures of the rational water use in irrigated farming and correction of irrigated norms" as one of the priority-driven tasks for implementation of mitigation and adaptation measures.

The Horn of Africa 2011 drought disaster - labeled by many agencies, as one of the most serious drought disasters in modern time - continues to unfold. Yet now, the appearance of the disaster has changed. With the recent rains that commenced early December ago, the drought has ended, but the crisis prevails. In some regions, notably in Kenya, the rains are furthermore the worst that some communities have experienced in 20 years.

While the scale of the drought could not be known, it was predicted more than a year earlier, October 2010, with first and foremost the anticipated impact from the La Nina. So while enough time was given to alert the response mechanisms put in place, the information spurred limited action with a traditional emergency scenario emerging as a consequence.
   
As the immediate effects of the drought have now come to an end, its full impact is yet to be calculated. It is meanwhile remarkable that relevant to the scale and depth of the drought, mortality levels were kept very modest. Yet, hundreds of thousands of people people have had to live well below subsistence levels, with severe levels of acute malnutrition as evidence of the severity of the situation. It is further known that large numbers in livestock have perished, in some areas more than fifty percent, and crops have failed across large areas, resulting in that it will take at least six months of support for agriculturalists to return to pre-disaster levels, and multiple years for pastoralists to achieve the same (IFRC, 2011).

It is hoped that the aftermath of the disaster will amongst other generate much discussion on:

1. that scale of disasers is not mesured in levels of morbidity but quality of living
2. Early Warning messages is better made use of
3. climate change adaptation is a continued part of the agricultural dialogue to secure livelihoods and
4. the approach to rural and agricultural development is aligned with sustainability and endurance of livelihood systems as a means to protect and save lives.

The latter in light of the last decades where attention has shifted away from agriculture among various large actors. For instance, The World Bank lent 26 and 10 percent respectively during the 1980's and 2000 to agriculture from its total budget (Millstone and Lang, 2003).

How to handle flood risk is probably a question as old as human settlements (1). Still today, most urbanization takes place along river beds or coasts and on floodplains, on historically favourable agricultural areas with navigable waterways. Being flat, these areas are typically prone to flooding. With continued urban expansion and population growth, urban flooding is destined to increase. Indeed, as concludes by a recent World Bank Policy Research Working Paper, flood impacts have grown in the recent past and are likely to grow in to the foreseeable future (2).

Increased urban flooding, however, is not only due to there being more people, activities and infrastructure in the way of excess water. Land use changes in catchment areas, where for example fewer trees make rainfall hit the ground and the clearing of ground vegetation hamper infiltration, may cause erosion and concentrate run-off from rains into flash floods. On top of this, climate change may already be inducing increased concentration of rainfall itself into heavier downpours in many areas.

Moreover, land use changes forming part of the urbanisation process itself often exacerbate the risk for flooding. Through paving and construction, increased permeability of the ground disrupts natural drainable systems, as do encroachment into water detention areas such as ponds or wetlands within or around the urban areas. Many cities are also outgrowing their originally constructed drainage systems, which may also suffer from poor maintenance as well as clogging by household and construction wastes.

The impacts of urban floods, however, are not shared equally. Low-income citizens living in informal settlements tend to be the hardest hit. The commonly poor standard of houses is directly linked to the insufficient incomes of its owners or occupants. The lack of infrastructure, such as drainage, roads or water & sanitation infrastructure is produced by combinations of issues like the lack of political influence by dwellers, unclear legal status of settlements, as well as by the sheer fact that the area is prone to flooding.

That flood-prone areas have poorly developed infrastructure is usually justified by that the area is not suitable for residential use. And since they are flood-prone, such settlements cannot be legalised, which is yet another inconvenience for services such as water or solid waste collection. The alternative – relocation – has unfortunately a very poor track record. As commented by Alfredo Stein (Lecturer in Urban Planning at University of Manchester – Global Urban Research Centre) in relation to possible relocation of people away from the capital in Haiti: “You are only going to be constructing ghettos that are far away from where people will need to restore their economic lives” (3).

As an alternative to relocation plans, there are development plans. Whereas there may be cases where there is a lack of awareness about flooding risks, settling on flood-prone areas is generally driven by other priorities that take precedence over flood risks. (Proximity to labour markets is often a top priority, particularly where public transport is insufficiently developed.) Partly, in the aftermath of an event, there needs to be a coordinated partnership between humanitarian and development actors in order to reconcile demands of quickly restoring basic infrastructure and services, and the more time consuming aspiration of ‘building back better’ (4).

Looking forward, extending services and infrastructure investments also to flood-prone urban areas should be seen as a ‘no-regret policy.’ Higher-quality infrastructure is more likely to withstand flood events. This is sorely needed in precisely the generally affected areas. Further, housing structures may be planned to be more resilient. There are many community-level construction strategies including elevated housing (e.g. on stilts) or the more costly concrete bottom floor, potentially augmented with a second floor of less sturdy materials. Even very simple measures such as shelves can help reduce inconveniences and loss of property during flooding events. All such investments are helped by affording legality or at least the sense of permanence, also greatly helped by the provision of services and infrastructure.

In last year’s World Disasters Report 2010, the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) proposed “Ten essentials for making cities resilient:” a) organisation and coordination to understand and reduce disaster risk, in collaboration with citizen groups; b) assign a budget and provide incentives to invest in disaster risk reduction; c) prepare risk assessments, which are to be readily available and discussed with the public; d) invest in critical infrastructure; e) assess safety of schools and health facilities; f) apply and enforce realistic building regulations; g) ensure education and training; h) protect ecosystems and natural buffers; i) install early warning systems and emergency management capacities, and last but not least; and j) ensure that the needs of survivors are placed at the centre of reconstruction.

I want to emphasise the last two; the focus on the people that are actually affected, and the issue of information. After all, floods are often cyclical or seasonal and generally predictable. Knowing what to do – in preparation as well as in emergency situations – can greatly reduce the problem presented by urban flooding. Fortunately, the basics seem to move in the right direction, as even though the number of flooding events and their economic impacts are steadily increasing; the immediate loss of life in relation to these events is not. This is attributed to more successful warning, evacuation and other emergency action, as well as investments in flood defences (5).

References:
(1) Associated Programame on Flood Management (2008) Urban Flood Risk Management. A Tool for Integrated Flood Management. Flood Management Tools Series. World Meteorological Organization and Global Water Partnership.
(2) Jha, A., Lamond, J., Bloch, R., Bhattacharya, N., Lopez, A., Papachristodoulou, N., Bird, A., Proverbs, D., Davies, J. and Barker, R. (2011)Five foot high and rising. Cities and Flooding in the 21st Century. The World Bank.
(3) Cited in International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (2010) World Disasters Report: Focus on Urban Risk, Geneva, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. Page 54.
(4) United Nations Human Settlements Programme (2007) Enhancing Urban Safety and Security. Global Report on Human Settlements 2007. Earthscan, London.
(5) Jha, A. et al (2011), page 14

Last year, two milestone UN resolutions affirmed the human right to water and sanitation. A great victory for the many who fought to clarify these rights in international law. The more skeptic-minded, perhaps especially those working in water sectors in developed countries, still sighed and said: What is the point of having a human right if it cannot be implemented? I heard the comment no later than yesterday by a colleague in the water sector, experienced in water management and certainly not lacking in solidarity with unserved people in developing countries. I also will never forget the frustration expressed to me by a renowned Professor, deeply committed to address the water situation for the poor, on the whole human rights discussion: it is just words!

Is talk about human rights just words? Are words the opposite of action? Michel Foucault, social theorist who made a significant contribution to social sciences with his theories on discourse, would surely think differently. He found that all periods of history have possessed certain underlying conditions of truth that constituted what was acceptable as, for example, scientific discourse. Looking at history, one can see that these conditions of discourse have changed over time, from one period's view on knowledge to another. What was seen as right and wrong in the 1700s is not the same today. Discourse, words, set the limits for what we see as true, and what we believe is possible for humans to do.  Following this view of the world, the UN deliberations on the right to water and sanitation that seem such a drawn out repetition of words and inaction, would actually be a change of our time’s underlying conditions of truth.  

In September of this year, the UN Human Rights Council also took a next step to help countries go from words to action.  Focusing on national plans of action, a new resolution was passed in the UN Human Rights Council, setting out a range of operational measures that should be taken by governments in order to implement the right to water and sanitation on the ground. This resolution firmly responds to the how- question so frequently asked for by practitioners and sceptics of words. The resolution calls upon States to:

1. Ensure that national minimum standards, based on human rights criteria, are in place when water and sanitation services are decentralized, in order to ensure coherence and countrywide compliance with human rights;
2. Set access targets to be reached in short-time periods for universal service provision, giving priority to realizing a basic level of service for everyone before improving service levels for those already served;
3. Set indicators, including disaggregated data, based on human rights criteria, to monitor progress and to identify shortcomings to be rectified and challenges to be met;
4. Assess whether the existing legislative and policy framework is in line with the right to safe drinking water and sanitation, and to repeal, amend or adapt it in order to meet human rights standards and principles;
5. Provide for a regulatory framework aimed at ensuring that all water and sanitation service providers respect and protect human rights and do not cause human rights violations or abuses,
6. Provide for a framework of accountability that provides for adequate monitoring mechanisms and legal remedies, including measures to overcome obstacles in access to justice and other accountability mechanisms and lack of awareness of the law, human rights and opportunities to claim these rights
7. Ensure full transparency of the monitoring and assessment of the implementation of plans of action, projects and programmes in the sectors of water and sanitation and to ensure, including in the planning process, the free, effective, meaningful and non-discriminatory participation of all people and communities concerned, particularly people living in disadvantaged, marginalized and vulnerable situations;
8. Ensure financing to the maximum of available resources in order to implement all the necessary measures to ensure that water and sanitation systems are sustainable and that services are affordable for everyone, while ensuring that allocated resources are not limited to infrastructure, but also include resources for regulatory activities, operation and maintenance, the institutional and managerial structure and structural measures, including increasing capacity.

It is time to act now!

Mountain regions in the world have experienced above-average warming in recent years. More than 50 % of the world’s population depends on water resources from the mountains. The Himalaya- HK-region is currently providing the necessary water for large parts of the population in Asia. But the current pace in glacier melting as an impact of climate change has significant implications for the ecosystem goods and services the mountain regions provide to humanity, which are especially critical for the survival of poor and indigenous communities.

Even in Sweden the glaciers are melting at an unforeseen pace and measurements of the highest peak, the southern peak of Kebnekaise, covered by a small glacier, in September showed that the top now only reaches 2099.7 m a.s.l., which is the very lowest that has ever been measures and is calculated as the lowest level during the last 1000 years! And the melting speed has increased steadily, not only in Sweden and the Himalayas but also at other high mountain regions. Even the glaciers and large ice masses at Greenland, Arctic and Antarctic are currently increasing their melting pace.

This increasing melting is beyond what scientists have calculated and what is shown in different scenarios as we so far have "only" increased the mean temperature by about 1oC. The impact by the glacier melting in the Himalayas, in particularly as Glacier Lake Outburst Floods, GLOFs, was emphasized in an early version of the NAPA-document of the government of Nepal, and is also described as what can cause catastrophes in valleys also in the NAPA of 2010. This of course may cause detrimental effects to the living conditions for the people living in the valleys. The melting of the Himalaya glaciers may result in an early flood situation and, above all, access to water will be very undeterminable.

Scientists also warn for that the rapid melting of the larger ice masses may result in a more rapidly sea level rise which then would threaten a important amount of world’s population living in low-lying areas, close to the sea.

The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, ICIMOD, is arranging a Mountain Day on December 4th, 2011, at the UNFCCC COP-17 in Durban, South Africa. This day will assemble a high-level panel to advocate the value and the critical role of mountains and thereby promote policy actions to ensure the contribution of mountain ecosystem goods and services in particularly the vital access to water.

The World Water Week in Stockholm this year focused on one of the increasing challenges for sanitation and water service delivery - urbanization. The global population is now more than half urban and cities are growing at a tremendous rate, especially in the developing world and in the small and medium-sized towns. This rapid urbanization process poses many challenges for those trying to provide services. First and quite simply, the increasing human density corresponds to increasing quantities of waste. This of course leads to environmental degradation, water pollution and a multitude of related health and livelihood impacts. Urbanization exacerbates the need for improved sanitation. Secondly, cities are often experiencing population growth that far exceeds their absorptive capacity in terms of shelter, water, sanitation infrastructure, public health services, employment, education, food supplies and environmental protection - a striking new challenge that has arisen within the span of a lifetime. The service backlog thus gives rise to an increasing number of slums and informal areas lacking adequate sanitation services.

There are a number of recent initiatives moving the focus of urban sanitation to the spotlight. For example, the City Sanitation Strategies in Indonesia that have developed over the last 5 years focusing on city-wide operational which transformed the sector. Increasingly investors such as the World Bank, Gates Foundation, African Water Facilities and European Union are financing urban solutions. The urban environment is challenging, but also leading to innovations in service delivery and financing, like the private entrepreneurs supported through Water & Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WUSP).

In our attempts to come to grips with the scale of the urban challenges there is increasing recognition that the term "urban" hides a complex mix of heterogeneous contexts. There is amazing diversity in the level of service provision within cities, from high income-high water consumption areas connected to sewerage systems, to proper toilets without proper waste management, to nothing at all. Although statistics usually show urban areas as having greater access to sanitation services, this can be misleading. In the case of urban slum dwellers, proximity doesn’t mean access to improved services. At the World Water Week, sector professionals were increasing recognizing that this spatial diversity needs to be taken into account when planning, designing and monitoring for urban sanitation.

In many ways meeting the urban challenge requires a paradigm shift in how we view the urban context and how we design urban sanitation services. The heterogeneous nature of the problem means that the solutions will also have to be heterogeneous. Instead of rolling out a single standard of city-wide services, meeting the needs of ALL city dwellers will mean adapting technology, management and financing structures that are matched to the urban context in which they are living. Matching services to specific contexts and social demographics will mean looking at a multitude of solutions and integrating them along the entire chain of environmental service delivery (including solid waste and drainage). Future city-wide planning may need to allow different standards and options at different levels of the city. One way of doing this is to start looking at the functions that services provide instead of focusing on specific technologies. This will open the door for innovation and critical linkages to complementary services. We need to start thinking out of the box, adapting solutions to specific urban contexts (http://susana.org/lang-en/library?view=ccbktypeitem&type=2&id=1019), and taking action at a variety of levels within the urban context. The urban challenge is also an exciting opportunity for a paradigm shift within the sanitation sector - as long as we remember that this transition requires advocacy and our active engagement at both local and global levels (see my news stream entry from 16th July).

At this time of year one can hardly write about anything water related without mentioning the World Water Week that has just ended in Stockholm. This year’s event saw the launch of two very interesting reports and one seminar on the nexus between water and agriculture. 

First out was the synthesis report ‘An Ecosystems Approach to Water and Food Security’ from UNEP and IWMI focuses on the linkages between ecosystems, water, and food production and that understanding of these linkages are essential to the health of all three. The report calls for a shift in the management of water from water for food to water for multifunctional agro-ecosystems, considering the whole ecosystem in order to achieve not only more crops per drop of water but rather more ecosystem services and products per drop. Then FAO which gave a sneak preview of their first global report (to be published later this year) on ‘The State of the World’s Land and Water Resources’ (SOLAW) which outlines the state of land and water resources for food production and threats to food security resulting from the scarcity and degradation of water resources. Lastly a seminar by UN-Water hosted a panel discussion as part of the preparation for the World Water Day in 2012 which is intended to draw the international attention on the relationships between water and food security.

While all these reports and talk might seem far from reality, for people living in Kenya like myself this is all too real. The importance of water for agricultural production is once again showing itself in eastern Africa. Horrific pictures and stories on TV and radio tell the tales of the suffering of some 12 million people on the eastern Horn of Africa, who in some areas are experiencing the worst drought in 60 years. Crops have failed, livestock are dying, and food prices are soaring. And yet this has not come as a surprise to anyone who is following the agricultural sector in Africa. The Horn of Africa probably has one of the most effective early warning systems to predict catastrophic events like this. But once again little attention was given to the escalating situation until starving children are broadcasted around the world. Prevention is always better than cure and much could have been done to avoid this situation. Even more disturbing is the fact that this part of the world is supposedly facing economic rather than physical water scarcity, caused by a lack of investment in water or a lack of human capacity to satisfy the demand for water.

What about the new glossy reports and the debates at World Water Weeks? Would these change the situation on the ground, would they save people from hunger? While providing excellent status and trends analysis and synthesize existing knowledge from various fields they constitute great background documents but hardly provide a new message. The need for integrated approaches and cross-sectoral collaboration is old knowledge. And the talk of the need for all sectors to appreciate all the services and products provided by the agro-ecosystem, not only food, and acknowledge that this  system is intrinsically connected to other ecosystems in the larger landscape is merely a rephrasing of the ecosystems approach. It is true though that by implementing the policy level recommendations is necessary this would not help the people of the Horn of Africa today. In other and perhaps more developed parts of the world such interventions are probably the most pertinent things to focus on but with countries like Somalia with a non- or at best dysfunctional government, a newly independent South Sudan, or a Kenya with not less than forty ministries more interested in petty turf wars than implementing the country’s development agenda, policy interventions, however necessary, is not a magical bullet providing an instant solution. What the small-scale subsistent farmers need are the many low-cost and simple technologies that have been around for along time. These such as rainwater harvesting, small-scale drip irrigation, and agroforestry to name a few must be rolled out on a grand scale in order to achieve significant impact on both food and water security for the majority of the world’s population.

The big three Himalayan rivers entering South Asia - the Brahmaputra, Ganges and Indus - provide the basic livelihood conditions for more than 1 billion people in Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, India and Pakistan. The rivers are of immense importance to these countries and their development. However, water availability per person is estimated to decline as the effects of climate change consolidate in the region and with rising temperatures and melting glaciers, more runoff will occur during rainy seasons and less during dry seasons. The Ganges is predicted to become seasonal by 2050. Water linked conflicts are also on the rise. A few years ago the then Indian Minister of Water Resources Das Munshi stated "I am not the Minister of Water Resources but the Minister of Water Conflicts".

 With such a grim picture for South Asia one would expect these large, transboundary river systems to attract much attention. It is today well known what should be done in order to deliver more welfare per drop of water used - but is it done? There are many answers to that question; some would say "yes" and other "no".

The Indus is a major river, covering 71% of the Pakistan territory and providing water for 77% of its population. The Indus Water Treaty was signed many years ago to handle the allocation of water between India and Pakistan. The treaty has reasonably well survived five decades and two wars between the basin neighbours and is today ranked as one of the most successful international treaties of water cooperation. However, as the treaty was designed in 1960 it does not provide for changes in water availability, increasing demands, environmental factors, data collection and sharing, or technological advancements. These are major shortcomings that need to be addressed - but they are not. Are the two countries so badly focusing on differences and conflicts and a danger of so-called “water wars”, that cooperation and development is of no importance? The fact that water wars do not exist has apparently no significance.

Further east in the Himalayan range we have neighbouring India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Bhutan. In "Cooperation or Conflict in Transboundary Water Management: Case Study of South Asia" (http://www.thirdworldcentre.org/hsjsouthasia.pdf), Asit K. Biswas compares two cases and discuss the opportunities for regional, basin-based cooperation. 

The first case is cooperation between India and Bhutan. The Chukha hydroelectric scheme was commissioned in 1986 and has since generated large amounts of energy for both countries. Peace, stability and growth have all thrived and Bhutan's GDP per person has increased greatly in recent years. That is fine. But the second case is one of many years of missed opportunities due to mistrust and the "big brother-small brother" syndrome. India, Nepal and Bangladesh are neighbours and have great opportunities for large-scale benefit sharing along their shared rivers; Nepal can develop and produce huge amounts of hydropower that India and Bangladesh are more than willing to buy, thus enhancing growth and development in all three countries. But a lack of trust and an absence of visionary thinking again block a much needed process. Costly as well, not to those blocking the development, but to those millions of poor people longing for electric light, children at school and decent living conditions. 

The Strategic Foresight Group (www.strategicforesight.com), a water think-tank based in Mumbai, India, is very concerned about the region's water development. In three recent reports, "The Himalayan Challenge: Water Security in Emerging Asia", "Himalayan Solutions: Co-operation and Security in River Basins" and "The Indus Equation", it argues forcefully that an emerging water crisis is on the way in South Asia. It also argues - and this is both constructive and positive - that this can potentially foster cooperation and security among the basin states. The group presents a number of specific areas where enhanced cooperation can flourish, like new technology, inter-disciplinary research, hydropower and regional conventions. 

Finally, in a recent SIWI report, "Addressing Power Asymmetry: How Transboundary Water Management May Serve to Reduce Poverty" (http://www.siwi.org/publications) the authors trace the linkages between power in transboundary water management and poverty. To understand better how a basin hegemon acts, and thus develop appropriate strategies to counter the potentially negative effects on cooperation, benefit sharing and growth is important.

To review Himalayan cooperation on shared water resources is a rather discouraging exercise. The opportunities for collaboration and benefit sharing are there. Still, almost nothing is happening. it is not because we do not know what to do - early warning systems, data collection and sharing, and setting up river basin commissions - is all well-established knowledge. Should we compare transboundary water management with food security and the wisdom of Nobel Price Laureate Professor Amarty Sen?  "Famines do not exist in democracies". When openness and debate become the rule of the day, the immense costs of inaction and inefficiency will not be tolerated.

The relation between water users and service providers has received too little attention and is underdeveloped: The rights and obligations of both users and providers of water services are poorly defined and the mutual understanding between the parties is often lacking. Further, many urban water users get their water through intermediate suppliers, also lacking agreements with customers as well as bulk suppliers.

The service relationships are often pictured as a triangle, with the state on the top, where politicians/policy makers institute utility regulation or develop contracts or compacts with service providers. This relationship has received long and persistent attention in the privatisation debate and the ensuing call for improved regulation of public as well as private service providers. On the other side, the state has a relationship with the citizens, expressing their voice through elections or other ways of contacting or influencing the various levels of government and state authorities. This relationship has received heightened attention in the definition of water (services) as a human right.

At the bottom of the triangle, then, is the more or less direct relationship between water users and the providers that physically make water available for human consumption. The 2004 World Development Report focussing on ‘Making Services Available for Poor People’ labelled this relationship, or exchange of services and ‘client power’ as ‘the short route of accountability.’ In contrast, ‘the long route of accountability’ went via the state machinery. The point made here was the influence the customers could have over the supplier through their commercial relationship.

Still, this potential commercial power of the client has been more conducive to generate informal and most often inadequate service provision, and has not been sufficient to bring sustainable services to urban dwellers, and certainly not to the poorer slum dwellers. The missing link for sustainable and equitable services is the lack of arrangements that are sufficiently awarding for providers, yet affordable and accessible for the communities.

In Albania, the Water Regulatory Authority and the MDG-F-sponsored programme for Economic Governance, Regulatory Reform, Public Participation and Pro-Poor Development have taken note of the wide disparity and the often poor conditions offered to households by the water system operators. This situation impelled them to develop a ‘model contract’ in consultation with all stakeholders, including consumer rights organisations and associations of water system operators. Opting for a long and detailed contract, it serves also as an educational tool for water services users and providers to learn about their rights as well as obligations towards one another. This ‘model contract’ is being implemented progressively by water operators throughout Albania.

In the Philippines, the National Water Resources Board and the MDG-F-sponsored programme for Enhancing Access to and Provision of Water Services with the Active Participation of the Poor found that many of the smaller water supply schemes were unsustainable as those in charge of operations and maintenance were often lacking the necessary capacity. It was found that when the customers were involved in determining the appropriate level of service as well as the appropriate tariff. Developing realistic levels of services and tariffs, water service providers were able to operate successfully. This mutual agreement and understanding of each others rights and obligations to one another were formalised and signed by representatives of the customers and the service providers, and witnessed by local leaders and other customers.

This work on the mutual understanding of rights and obligations of both water consumers and water service providers is being presented at a Side Event at the World Water Week (Interests of Water Users and Service Providers: Mutual Understanding of Rights and Obligations - Sunday, 2011-08-21 at 17:45 to 18:45 in Room K24). It is proposed as a practical way of working towards the realisation of the human right to water, and it addresses the too poorly developed – too often even missing – link in the urban water supply chain.

It is standard procedure for international sanitation researchers to quote the vast statistics of how many people lack access to improved sanitation services and criticize the lack of resources and attention paid to the sector in general. There are calls for greater action, the "Sustainable Sanitation: Five-Year Drive to 2015", greater publicity and change. Yet, forward process often seems incremental and sometimes non-existent. I was in Botswana last week for a scoping trip regarding new approaches for more sustainable sanitation and was struck again by how entrenched conventional wastewater ideas are with practitioners and decision-makers in the sector. This is not only the case in Botswana, it is the same scenario in Sweden. What is it that is creating such inertia in the sector and how do we start transitioning towards more sustainable options?

A recent report from the Sanitation Global Practice Team of the Water and Sanitation Program and the World Bank looked to political-economy as one way to why sanitation is not given adequate priority and why interventions often do not reach the poorest populations . The study looked into the social, political and economic processes determining the extent and nature of sanitation investment and service provision. What it found was that cultural and historical contexts are significant determiners of sanitation investment. In other words, social taboos and fractured or hierarchical politics lower political motivation to prioritize resources for sanitation. And when there are resources for sanitation, there is a strong preference for highly visible, big infrastructure investments. This can be explained in part by the technical bias of engineers, who have all been trained in sewerage systems; desires to gain power and prestige from big infrastructure, and perhaps ignorance that other options exist.
 

Looking closely at these causes for inertia can give us some tips on how to overcome them. Diversifying the education of sanitary engineers is needed, but will hardly give short-term results. Perhaps there is a way to design sustainable sanitation investment that is even more visible and nice-looking as the conventional sewerage so as to tempt politicians and voters. Here generating public demand and communication can lead to higher visibility and political incentives for sanitation investment. Linking fractured water and sanitation sectors and creating cross-sectorial bridges in political hierarchies is also crucial. In this way, sanitation can find an institutional home with a mandate, capacity and resources to create change.
 

At the same time we need to consider how to build pressure for leapfrogging the sector into more sustainable regimes. There are several ways to do this, either through international cooperation or through internal change. Swedish actors are well-positioned to create this change either abroad or at home. Partner driven cooperation or direct investment for sustainable approaches with foreign partners is one approach. Swedes are good at working across sectors and can provide needed institutional and technical support. Expanding the education of sanitary engineers through courses taught in Sweden or abroad is another. On the home front, a global movement can be started right here by aligning our own thinking and sanitation systems for sustainability. These ideas can eventually be exported to the rest of the world. Finally, we need to remember that in spite of challenges, individual champions can and do make a difference.

At the UN Climate Change Conference held in Bonn 6 - 17 June, with meetings in the working groups under the convention as well as in the Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI) and the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA), water was not only discussed in the corridors but at the meetings with the SBSTA and during the Side Event "Water, Climate and Development: Towards COP 17".

The Side Event on “Water, Climate and Development” was co-arranged by the Water and Climate Coalition, WCC [1], www.waterclimatecoalition.org , Global Water Partnership and African Ministers Council on Water, AMCOW. It was the main activity focusing on how water related issues in relation to climate change could be better addressed in the UNFCCC-process. The Cancun meeting resulted in water being on the SBSTA-agenda as the Agenda Item 13 of the SBSTA on ‘Impacts of climate change on water resources and water management’. The WCC now is strongly advocating for the UNFCCC to “define a space for reporting and evaluation on how water is integrated and highlighted in different programmes and mechanisms under the UNFCCC”. The main goal is according to WCC for the UNFCCC process to establish a work programme on water under the Convention. The Executive Secretary of the AMCOW at the Side Event rightly pointed out that the water representation at the UNFCCC and the Convention on Biodiversity tend to run in separate tracks. The CBD has a programme on Inland Water Biodiversity, but the processes and the issues are not compatible although both conventions were opened for signatures at the Rio Conference 1992.

The discussions during the SBSTA 34 including the informal consultations undertaken by the chair of the SBSTA resulted in that the Parties agreed to discuss the issue of water under the Agenda Item 3, the Nairobi Work Programme. This was the formal agreement reached, but the discussion leading up to that included a request to prepare a technical paper on water and climate change impacts and adaptation strategies, as well as the need for a review of NAPAs and NAMAs with a view to strengthen and creating coherence in water dependent actions, which was put forward by a number of Parties to the Convention.

However, there might be something to use in the process to strengthen water in the UNFCCC process that may be learnt from what happened at the 10th COP to the Convention on Biological Diversity. Deriving from reviews of published assessments including the IPCC report on water, a set of Policy Agreements and Guidance on Water and Climate Change were proposed by the CBD Second Technical Expert Group on Biodiversity and Climate Change to the CBD. These policy statements and guidance were adopted by the COP of CBD in October 2010. 

References
[1] The SWH is a key member of the WCC

The international tools that are being developed to reinforce everyone's human right to water are largely focusing on individual rights to a certain amount of safe drinking water. The surrounding debates often touch on how to reconcile this right to water with privatisation, pricing of water, decision making processes and the role of the judiciary - problems that arise as water is being fetched or distributed and what to do when it is too expensive or too inaccessible.

But there is another perspective on the right to water among the indigenous communities around the world. According to a range of international documents and treaties, such as the Article 169 of the International Labour Organization, indigenous peoples not only have the right as individuals to a certain amount of drinking water per day, but they have a special right to access and govern the entire water resource as it flows through the landscape (the right to participate in the use, management and conservation of the natural resources pertaining to their lands, article 15.1 of ILO 169).

In a statement at the recent session of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (16-24 May), Catarina de Albuquerque, Special Rapporteur on the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation stated that "As Special Rapporteur, I regularly receive information about threats to indigenous rights, including especially concerns about pollution of water sources. For example, I have received numerous reports about the impact of mining operations - from uranium mining in the US to bauxite mining in India - indigenous peoples are seeing severe impacts on their access to clean water, as well as on their way of life and culture." Mining has serious environmental effects and often causes water pollution which, if not treated, naturally stands in the way for access to healthy drinking water. But the Special Rapporteur also refers to the mining impacts as having unwelcome effects on the way of life and culture of indigenous peoples - something quite larger than a discussion on the adequate amount of drinking water that a state must ensure its citizens. While much of the arguments for a human right to water in fact covers the performance of water services and how they can be used to fulfil individuals’ right to water, the claims made by indigenous communities are to more extensive water rights. These claims are made on the basis of a collective right of a traditional community to a natural resource.

The NGO Friends of the Earth International in 2004 stated that the concept of collective rights emerged because individual human rights do not guarantee adequate protection for indigenous peoples and other minorities exhibiting collective characteristics. Since then, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples has clearly formulated in its 25th  article that "Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain and strengthen their distinctive spiritual relationship with their traditionally owned or otherwise occupied and used lands, territories, waters and coastal seas and other resources and to uphold their responsibilities to future generations in this regard." At the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, Special Rapporteur de Albuquerque continued to refer to large scale infrastructure projects: "Projects to generate new sources of energy, such as dams and geothermal exploration, have also been reported to me as having a serious impact on access to clean water for indigenous peoples." Concerns about pollution of water sources are rampant in indigenous communities because not only do they threaten access to safe drinking water, but to cultural practices central for upholding a collective identity. A picture is thus emerging in which access to water, cultural heritage and sound environmental management cannot be separated.

UN General Comment No. 15 states that: "States should take steps to ensure that (…) indigenous peoples' access to water resources on their ancestral lands is protected from encroachment and unlawful pollution. States should provide resources for indigenous peoples to design, deliver and control their access to water."  In order to make that happen, indigenous populations need to be more involved in water management. Valmaine Toki of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues for 2011 - 2013, in an interview with Media Global on June 2nd points out that policies implemented by governments do not include an indigenous perspective to water. He emphasises that "(…) mismanagement, over-allocation to intensive agricultural practices, and extractive industries such as mining, results in pollution of waterways, ecosystem, and livelihoods (…)" Toki noted that among the forum’s most promising recommendations is the appointment of a Special Rapporteur for the Protection of Water and Water Catchment Areas, mandated to protect indigenous regions that are affected by industrial negligence (see the article here)

The degree of lack of water is often based on a pattern of discrimination in society. Those who are discriminated against in terms of political influence, housing rights, land rights etc and based on their religious, cultural or cast identity or economic status, are those who mostly lack safe water and improved sanitation. Indigenous peoples in many societies constitute a segment of the population that is widely discriminated against and therefore their lack of water and sanitation is often widespread. Their lack of access is not a coincidence but a result of politics which exclude them from shaping their own lives.

But addressing the lack of water of indigenous peoples entails a set of broader issues. Ensuring specific, targeted and deliberate policies and measures to make sure that the overall progress of a society also reaches the excluded segments of the population is just one the cornerstones. At an absolute minimum, affected people should be included in relevant decision-making processes of development projects on their ancestral lands. Amending formal water rights to align more with customary water rights is another measure that indigenous communities call for. Indigenous communities must also be included more at all water policy and implementation levels.

References

• 24 May 2011, Statement to the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues Catarina de Albuquerque, Special Rapporteur on the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation
• Media Global article
• 2002, General Comment No.15
• 2007, Manual on the Right to Water and Sanitation, Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions
• 2004:"Our environment, our rights. Standing up for people and the planet" Friends of the Earth International
• Article 25 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

Last week I visited Incredible India. I was there to guide a delegation from the Nile Basin Initiative on a study tour to the Cauvery Basin in Southern India. The main purpose of the visit was to review how agriculture is supported in the basin, but we also learned much about the effects of a booming economy on scarce water resources, and how an inter-state water conflict has evolved. This NewsStream is about the conflict; how a national transboundary water resources conflict has evolved and is now close to being resolved by innovative leaders and ordinary farmers. It is about the Cauvery Family, a bottom-up, civil society, multi-stakeholder forum based on mutual trust and understanding.

The Cauvery Basin is the grain basket of southern India, but also one of the country’s most controversial and debated rivers. It is shared between four states, and between the upstream state of Karnataka and the downstream state of Tamil Nadu there is a foul conflict inherited from colonial times. In order to favour downstream farming, two British-controlled entities – the upstream Princely State of Mysore and the City of Madras (now the city of Chennai in Tamil Nadu) – signed an agreement where water would be released for irrigation schemes in Tamil Nadu. 

Over time, India has become independent and there have been significant developments in the upper stretches of the Cauvery basin. Notably, the present-day IT centre of Bangalore is the capital of Karnataka. With rapid population growth and a booming economy, Cauvery waters are needed upstream, and Karnataka has for long unilaterally reduced the release of water for downstream irrigation. Right or wrong, but that is not a good approach. With demands exceeding the supply in the basin, the Cauvery River even fails to reach the sea. All waters are already usurped in this so-called ‘closed basin.’

The formal status of the conflict today is one of standstill. Despite twenty years of high level judiciary engagement in New Delhi, two tribunal awards and a Supreme Court decision, all supporting the downstream state’s position, water is still a cause for anger and difficulties. Even when the Prime Minister of India engaged himself, following an outbreak of violence leaving 23 persons killed, Government decisions were not followed. The conflict is still unresolved.

The Cauvery Family has to be looked upon in this context. The “family” was born in June 2003 by civil society and academic leaders. Farmers (the basin’s by far largest water user group) from all the sub-basins of the river started to meet regularly to work out their differences and find options for an agreement. They put great emphasize on the need for continued dialogue and to maintain the person to person contact. The perspective was one of long-term commitment and to focus on optimizing the use of currently available water. This has lead to an atmosphere of mutuality, respect and trust.

The NBI delegation had the opportunity to meet many “family members” during their visit to the basin. Members told the delegation how they in the past had “threatened to take their state out of the union” if the tribunal decisions were not changed and how they refused to speak to people from the other state. Now they acknowledged each other as one family, even “closer than my own father”.

Has this civil society movement made any progress? Yes, it has. Tremendous progress, actually. They are now very close to reach an agreement between representatives of the two states, which, when reached, will be followed by a petition to the Supreme Court in New Delhi to turn the agreement into a formal decision. And as all state leaders have agreed to follow such a decision, success is close. 

There are several reasons for this potentially successful outcome. One is the seriousness of the situation; the lack of trust and cooperation in the basin is simply turning too costly. Second, India’s openness and democracy allows this to happen. Third, good leaders exist, being both accountable to their supporters and responsible and serious in their deliberations. And fourth, that a shared culture has evolved over time, turning people into “one family” and good neighbours when an opportunity is offered.   

Although the very Cauvery Family approach is unique, there are a few other cases, somewhat resembling the “family” approach. For example, the transboundary groundwater management scheme now in place in North Africa is the outcome of many years of interactions between dedicated engineers, increasingly knowing and trusting each other, and finally coming up with a win-win agreement (http://www.oss-online.org/index.php?lang=en). Another example is a network called the Euphrates Tigris Initiative for Cooperation (ETIC), an academic Track 2 approach to promote cooperation in that region (http://webapps01.un.org/dsd/ partnerships/public/partnerships/1479.html). 

Returning to Africa, what thoughts did we bring with us from India? Many – and highly contradictory! Crowded streets, pollution, lack of formal cooperation, yes, it is all there. But also strong farmers, standing up for their rights and taking their concerns all the way to the mighty Supreme Court in far away New Delhi. And how a people’s initiative takes over where a government fails, and is now close to resolving an old and bitter transboundary water conflict. Impressive!          
   
By: Klas Sandström

Agriculture is widely accepted as being an important engine of socio-economic development for developing countries. With 85% of Africa’s poor living in rural areas and largely depending on agriculture for their livelihoods, agricultural growth is clearly the key to rural poverty reduction. And using water for crop irrigation has always been a way to boost agricultural production and was a cornerstone in the Green Revolution. Despite the general western conception of the African continent as drought stricken, Sub-Saharan Africa has a large untapped potential for irrigation. Only four percent of the total cultivated area is under irrigation, and not all arable land are yet under the plough or hoe on the continent.

Irrigation of crops has played a major role in the development of societies since ancient times. While many of the government supported large-scale irrigation schemes of the 20th century are struggling to keep up production and maintaining infrastructure, there has been a renewed interest in small-scale irrigation over the past years. When channel irrigation, flooding, and other conventional irrigation systems tend to waste large quantities of water without being used by the plants, micro systems such as drip irrigation ensure that water goes straight to the soil or roots and keeps the water demand to a minimum. Drip irrigation systems were developed in the 1960’s by commercial farmers in dry regions of the USA and Israel. But the systems don’t have to be fancy and hi-tech; low cost, simple to use systems developed for small scale subsistence farmers uses merely a 20 litre bucket and 30 meters of cheap garden hose.
A lot of research in recent decades has shown the significant potential for small scale drip irrigation systems to increase yields and incomes and promote food security.  One such low-cost system for vegetable production called the ‘African Market Garden’ developed by the International Center for Research in the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) is said to increase the returns on land, water and labour two, four and six times respectively. Development of these kinds of systems are promoted by development organisations as a strategy for poverty reduction, climate adaptation and food security  for small scale farmers but many donors say they are too expensive to scale up.

It is therefore very encouraging that the winner of the 2010 Millennium Development Goals Award for the MDG 1 category ‘Eradicate Extreme Poverty and Hunger’ was a Kenyan private company selling small-scale drip irrigation systems. Amiran Kenya Ltd won the award for their development of the Amiran Farmers Kit, an all-inclusive kit which includes all components necessary for a successful season’s harvest. Developed around a gravity-fed drip irrigation system developed in Israel and irrigating about 500m2, it is small enough to fit small-scale Kenyan farmers pressed for arable land (Kenya has an arable land ration of only 0.2 ha/person). The kit, which combines the drip irrigation system, a water tank, a greenhouse, seeds, fertilizers, and agro-chemicals, is fully portable in a pick—up truck and comes with installation, training and an agro-support package in the form of extension service, market linkages and access to credits. The unique feature is that it is a purely commercial product targeting small-scale African farmers. And even though the price of around 2,200 US dollars might be a deterrent, the kit’s association with financial institutions and the potential to make a net profit already in the first year of its operation has ensured it becoming a success. These features are critical factors in the company’s aim to roll out the kit throughout the continent.

However, a word of caution might be appropriate. While low-cost small-scale irrigation could truly be a blessing for many poor farmers it could also be a curse for the environment. With the expansion of land under irrigation and access to cheap solar-powered water pumps the interventions could have consequences in the form of reduced water flows for downstream users or lowered groundwater tables. The technology also opens up opportunities to farm new marginal lands. Agricultural expansion is already one of the main reasons for biodiversity degradation and habitat fragmentation, which might have severe impacts for both people depending on ecosystem services for their livelihoods and the majestic wildlife of Africa which generate much needed job opportunities and incomes for governments.  
 

The World Water Day this year focused on ‘Water for Cities: Responding to the Urban Challenge.’ This is timely, since most of the world’s population now lives in urban areas. Nevertheless, the urban half of the world’s population generally benefits from greater access to water for household use, with near 80% enjoying access to piped water compared to 34% in rural areas of the world. Regional disparities are of course enormous: Whereas piped water access rates are on the increase in Eastern and South-Eastern Asia as well as Northern Africa, they are declining in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia. (The use of other so-called improved water sources is largely making up for the piped shortfall, so the proportion without access is still going down or, as in the case of Sub-Saharan Africa and Western Asia, remain constant.)[1]

This relative decline of piped water services in many urban areas reflects that the continued urban growth is largely taking place in informal settlements, where urban consolidation takes place on uncertain legal foundations or in contravention of planning and building regulations, and where infrastructure is generally inadequate. The World Water Day Official Site state that “38% of the [urban] growth is represented by expanding slums.”[2]  The heart of the ‘Urban Challenge’ lies in the fact that most new and many old city dwellers reside in areas where there is no infrastructure to safely convey water to their homes, nor to drain the areas of waste- or stormwater.

The urban water crisis relate more to the lack (or inadequacy) of piping than to the lack of water. In fact, urban water scarcity can often be alleviated by improving the quality of infrastructure, given the significant quantities of water being lost to leakage in many places.

The largest share of the infrastructure cost of an urban water system lies in the distribution system. Unfortunately, investments in this multitude of small-bore pipes renders less prestige and apparently attracts less funding than do larger waterworks such as dams and treatment plants. As a consequence, most low-income cities have distribution systems that only serve a proportion of the population. Those left without access to water infrastructure invariably belong to the poorest urban dwellers.

This skewed reality, with a piped system serving the privileged few and a multitude of informal, independent or self-help initiatives bringing much-needed but often expensive and low-quality water services to the poor, explains why ‘The Poor Pay More’ also in the water sector. When designing urban water pricing policies, the reasons behind this well-known irony seems to be forgotten; and water tariffs are designed as if the poorest were connected along with the wealthiest.

 ‘Social water tariffs,’ with targeted subsidies to low-income households or ‘life-line’ quantities provided at a lower cost or even for free, will help those in need only when they are connected to central water services. This is often the case in high- or middle income cities. In low-income cities, however, social tariffs cannot be expected to reach the poor who get water through their own arrangements or from vendors (who rarely qualify for social tariffs or any discount or subsidy at all).

Those who benefit from low water prices tend to be the privileged minority. In the case of Phnom Penh, whose Water Supply Authority (PPWSA) has transformed from a war-torn loss-maker into a world class example of efficiency and self-sufficiency, the water price used to cover only half of the cost of operation. When raising the water tariff, resistance was met – not from the poor who stood the chance of eventually getting access to piped water – but from mass media representing the privileged few. The quest of turning the PPWSA to operate with profit included the persistent negotiation with existing customers that water must be paid for, along with the finding of creative and economical means for extending the network and connecting the lower-income communities.[3]

In such a way, ‘social connections’ can be a way to enhance connection rates and a step towards fulfilling the human right to equal access to public services.[4] As long as the ‘first-time-connection’ funds are accompanied by sufficient physical investment in the distribution system as well as transparent and inclusive policies for actually connecting, a truly pro-poor urban water policy will see the light of day!

References
[1] WHO & UNICEF (2010) 'Progress on sanitation and drinking-water, 2010 update'. New York and Geneva: WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation. Page 55.
[2]  www.unwater.org/worldwaterday/
[3] The Connection - ADB Water Voices Documentary Series
[4] Article 21, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

In February of this year Sierra Leone announced its 1000 open-defecation free village at the same time as organizations in Niger are geared up for a campaign to produce similar results there (IRIN, 2011). Only 2% of the population in Niger has access to adequate sanitation and a majority of people use no toilet at all, defecating in the open and giving pathogens ample opportunity to spread. Organizations such as Plan Niger and UNICEF are working to change this, using a well-known method for driving behavior change, Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS). The techniques used in CLTS focus on building feelings of disgust and shame related to open defecation – thus motivating people to stop open defecation and use a toilet.

The popularity of CLTS is derived from the realization within the sanitation community that simply building better sanitation facilities may not be enough to get people to use them. One of the biggest stumbling blocks for improving the sanitation and corresponding health situation around the world is that it means changing the hygiene and defecation practices of individuals. Humans are creatures of habit and motivating change can be an extremely difficult task (ask anyone who has tried to break a bad habit), perhaps especially when it has to do with a taboo subject such as sanitation. The tactics of CLTS have meet with some success in Asia and Africa, yet in other areas they have been criticized as manipulative and inappropriate for the local culture. But at least one thing is sure – stronger drivers than a shiny toilet are needed to get people to change.

While many people understand the need for behavior change when it comes to open defecation, it is actually an issue for sustainable sanitation across the globe. There is growing agreement that achieving sustainable sanitation will require new innovations, even in places like Sweden where wastewater infrastructure is nearly universal (Lüthi et al., 2010). For example, future sanitation systems will need to drastically reduce water use and close the loop on nutrients. The toilets of the future may very well look and work differently than the standard flush-toilet with which we are familiar. New innovations will mean changes in the current system and will require users to adapt accordingly. The changes to the actual user interface may be large or small, but if the new systems are to achieve the ambitious health and environmental goals it will demands that people change.

school education on how to use a urine-diverting toilet (from SuSanA site, photo by Robert Gensch)

That an individual’s behavior can make a difference for all is true for more than just sanitation. In order to meet ambitious climate change policy and reduce the carbon footprint for the entire city, the City of Stockholm has started a public awareness campaign aimed at changing the inhabitants’ lifestyles and consumer behaviors. Being climate smart is rather trendy these days, yet the City is spending significant time and resources to really motivate change. However, imagine how much more effort would to needed to convince consumers, the housing market and politicians to back a change that would gradually replace all flush-toilets in Stockholm with, say dry composting toilets. There just isn’t enough incentive to change right now; just as many open-defecators in Niger see no reason to change their morning routine of visiting the nearest bush. Yet achieving sustainable sanitation for all will require that we overcome this societal inertia and find a way to motivate change in hygiene and sanitation behavior at all levels.  We need to start critically assessing our current behavioral and organizational practices in order to identify how technologies, knowledge, and policy can act as catalysts for change.  The message has to be right.

References
IRIN Humanitarian News and Analysis, 23 February 2011
Lüthi, C., Panasar, A., Schütze, T., Norström, A., McConville, J., Parkinson, J., Saywell, D., & Ingle, R. (2010). Sustainable Sanitation in Cities: A Framework for Action. Papiroz Publishing House: Rijswiik, The Netherlands.

Based on the fact that many water bodies cross boundaries in the region of the UN Economic Commission for Europe UNECE - alsoincluding Central Asia - the ECE is developing a programme to promote cooperation in adapting to climate change in transboundary basins. The programme is based on the “Guidance on Water and Adaptation to Climate Change”  , developed under the ECE ‘Convention on the Protection and Use of Transboundary Watercourses and International Lakes’, shortly the ‘Water Convention’. Under this programme it was initiated a series of pilot projects of different types, including on the Chu Talas Basin (Kazakhstan-Kyrgyzstan), Dniester Basin(Moldova-Ukraine), Sava river basin (Bosnia/Herzegovina-Croatia-Serbia-Slovenia), and Neman river basin (Belarus-Lithuania-Russian Federation). Ongoing activities on water and climate change on the Rhine basin, the Meuse basin, the Amur/Argun/Daursky Biosphere reserve and on the Danube river basin are also included. The programme is supported by a platform for exchanging experience between pilot projects including by discussions and information exchange at workshops, the second one on ‘Water and Adaptation to Climate Change in Transboundary Basins’ to be held 12-13 April. The first workshop resulted in very useful documentation available at this webpage. This work together with the work on the pilot projects will, no doubt promote the integration of Water and Adaptation to Climate Change in Transboundary Basins.

A Task Force on Water and Climate facilitates the programme but is not a decision-making body. This task force is a Body of the Water Convention and is jointly led by Germany and the Netherlands. Both of these countries are active supporters of the pilot projects in particularly of course of the activities regarding water and climate change adaptation in the Rhine basin. The government of Finland is contributing to the pilot project on the Neman river basin. Several governments from Eastern Europe and Central Asia are actively supporting project implementation in "their" pilot river basins and are also participating at the workshop meetings. This demonstrates a clear interest from governmental level for a strong integration between adaptation to climate change and transboundary river basins e.g. freshwater. The UNFCCC, who was represented at last year’s workshop, showed an interest in carrying results from this process further. And as there will be a presentation of progress of the pilot projects at the Seventh Ministerial Conference "Environment for Europe", to be held in Astana,Kazakhstan, 21-23 September, there will be a possibility to emphasize the clear interdependence between climate change and river basin planning at ministerial level prior to the South African COP later this year - although the ministers will ‘only’ come from the UNECE region. But as countries outside the UNECE have demonstrated an interest in ratifying the convention this interdependence may be recognized and agreed.
 

Waters that cross borders and link us together was the topic of the World Water Day in 2009. It is a topic that continues to draw the attention of governments, academia and the donor community around the world. This is no surprise as 40% of the world’s population lives in basins that share rivers and lakes with other countries. The management challenge in the different basins vary: In rich, industrialized countries the main issue is often that of poor water quality, like in the Baltic Sea, while in many developing countries the main concern is often water scarcity, and thus the issue of how to share a limited resource between many demands - across political borders. That is not an easy task.  

The theme of this year’s World Water Week is 'Water in an Urbanizing World'. This is indeed a very important issue as water has become an increasingly fragile and scarce resource in rapidly growing cities. In many developing countries municipalities struggle to provide its residents with even the most basic water services. Amid the water scarcity urban agriculture has find its way to become one of the main livelihood strategies for poor city dwellers to cope with the harsh reality of city life. 

World-wide an ever growing force of urbanization is taking place as people leave their rural homes for a perceived urban life full of luxury, comfort, opportunities, and access to basic social amenities. In Kenya, as in most developing countries, the majority end up living in informal settlements (slums). In Nairobi alone there are about 150 slums with over 1.5 million inhabitants. Kibera is the largest slum in Nairobi, possibly the largest in Africa, with anywhere between 300,000 and one million people living in wood and tin shacks squeezing in an area just about half the size of Central Park in New York.

Kibera Slum in Nairobi, photo by Schreibkraft

Life in Kibera is accompanied by high levels of poverty, unemployment and food insecurity. As in so many other slums across Africa and the world a common way to deal with these challenges is to engage in urban farming. Many people in Kibera are now growing food on every piece of available land, in backyards, along stream, roads and railway, and under power lines. Often on land they don't own. Most of the farmers in Kibera are women and their efforts yield significant benefits in terms of nutrition, food security, and income for their households. In order to water their crops they use any available water source, often from local streams, roadside drains, and untreated wastewater and sewage. All likely to be heavily contaminated due to the slum's poor sanitation arrangements and unregulated municipal and industrial effluents. And even though wastewater can carry a number of risks, such as pathogens and contamination from all sorts of industrial waste, it provides a free source of fertilizer to farmers who don't have money to buy expensive fertilizers. Urban farming is believed to account for some 20% of the global food supply, with half of this food being grown using wastewater, according to a 2009 survey of 53 cities conducted by the International Water Management Institute. But in sub-Saharan Africa, urban farmers depending on wastewater for their crops are producing 70–90% of the perishable vegetables consumed in African cities. This poses severe threats to the health of both producers and consumers. Among wastewater-related infections, diarrhoea is the top cause of death among children under the age of five in the developing world.

In today's cities more and more people compete over a limited quantity of water for domestic and productive uses. The current trend of rapid urbanization and growth of urban slums outpacing urban growth by a wide margin will result in higher proportions of the urban population living in poverty. If more and more poor people turns into urban agriculture to eke out a living this can put already stretched urban water supply and wastewater systems in developing countries under increasing pressure. Urban farming can provide slum dwellers with food and income but there is a need to provide cheap ways to increase water use efficiency in production and safe ways of using wastewater if this potential solution is not to turn into a threat. The upcoming 1st Africa Agriculture and Water Dialogue in South Africa and the World Water Week with one of its workshops focusing on future challenges for urban water services and infrastructure could provide good platforms for the interesting and necessary discussions around the nexus of urban farming and water. 

Discussions about urban water management have during the past two decades been dominated by the privatization debate. There seems to be no conclusive evidence regarding any absolute advantages or disadvantages of either public or private operation and even ownership of the urban water infrastructure. A lasting outcome from the debate is instead the recognition of the plurality of actors on the urban water scene. We have public and private water utility companies. We also have small-scale often informal providers, which operate more or less efficiently, but nevertheless have a role to play.

With the plurality of actors, and sometimes even multiple physical systems within the same urban area, the need for governance and appropriate regulation of urban water activities have come to the fore. Water utility regulation, of both private and public service providers, is generally seen as a government prerogative. How well regulators in different parts of the world will be able to enhance the urban water service efficiency and equity, by monitoring and providing incentives for correction and improvement, remains to be seen.

In a review of utility performance in the United States and elsewhere, it was found that the debate over privatization had overshadowed influential drivers of success, such as "effective staffing, consistent community support for adequate funding, detailed asset management, performance measurements and rewards aligned to organizational objectives, and processes that are transparent and open to the public."

Some of these drivers have been well addressed by the Phnom Penh Water Supply Authority (PPWSA), which under the leadership of Mr. Ek Sonn Chan has been recognized for its remarkable trajectory from a corrupt and inefficient utility to one of world class performance, and bestowed with Stockholm Industry Water Award in 2010. In 1993 Mr. Ek Sonn Chan was appointed as General Director of PPWSA. Together with his team, he managed to refurbish the whole supply system, introduce cost-effective billing and creative payment collection methods, as well as to provide clean water to almost all of the city’s residents.

While remaining in public hands, PPWSA has put tremendous effort into 'effective staffing' and 'performance measurements and rewards aligned to organizational objectives'. Also, in the quest to raise tariffs to cover costs of operations, maintenance and future expansions, PPWSA managed to secure community support by turning to those having been excluded from services in the previous inequitable system. Moreover, by subsidizing connections, and transparently explaining the cost and procedure for getting one; service coverage has gone up, and petty corruption down.

The issue of utility management - where the PPWSA is an outstanding success story - along with the appropriate policy and regulatory environment remains as challenges at the global level. Also, the long term financing of urban infrastructure still requires much more attention - and priority! That is, money!

Still, with more money, the need for well-focused and balanced investment increases. An increasing proportion of available funding needs to target enhanced service coverage and quality by investing in water distribution and sanitation systems that serve also low-income groups. (Too large a proportion of investments go to high-visibility objects like treatment plants. These are needed but cannot be optimally utilized if the rest of the infrastructure is lacking or is out of reach for the people it should serve.)

The upcoming World Water Week in August 2011 addresses the overarching challenge of Responding to Global Changes: Water in an Urbanizing World. One of the workshops looks into the pertinent topic of 'Financing of Urban Infrastructure'. It will examine examples of instruments and incentives that are deemed to be successful cases of financial arrangements. While the announcement points to the urgent challenge of matching realities of affordability and population growth with the need for cost-efficient, equitable and sustainable services, it claims there are bold ways to scale up and maintain infrastructure and also address challenges of resource management. This promises to be an interesting event!

The other workshops announced for the World Water Week raise the perspective and address some of the future challenges for urban water services and infrastructure. Where are we heading in terms of the long-term water management and catchment-related changes and risks in urban areas? What are the consequences for ecosystems and adjacent rural areas? What kind of responses is needed to adapt cities to climate variability and change? And what new approaches, technologies and infrastructures are required to sustainably manage the resource fluxes in our increasingly urban world? 

Some workshops keep present-day inequities in focus and explore issues like: How do we promote the efficient service delivery to the disfavored urban populations that currently stand without? What are the opportunities for forging closer links between the formal and informal service providers? And what regulatory frameworks are there to foster socially just service provision?

With basic water and sanitation services being recognized as human rights (by most states), urban water managers have additional impetus for actually focusing on those not previously privileged beneficiaries of subsidized services. With additional legal weight behind their claims, low-income urban populations hopefully stand a better chance ahead of duly benefitting from existing and future urban infrastructure systems. Can water sector regulators also find incentives and ways to monitor the equity as well as efficiency in the urban water service delivery - then we can hope for truly pro-poor water governance seeing the light of day!

by Marianne Kjellén,
Stockholm Environment Institute, Stockholm University and WGF (UNDP Water Governance Facility at SIWI)

As this year begins, we know that a series of crucial events will take place that will affect the status of drinking water and sanitation as human rights. Last year, two milestone events took place on the international arena.

On 30 September last year, the UN Human Rights Council affirmed for the first time that the human right to water and sanitation is legally binding. This was a welcome move for all those who have worked hard to clarify the responsibilities for the provision of water and sanitation, and strengthen international support for these rights. The Council now made the clarification that the right to water and sanitation is derived from the right to adequate standard of living, included in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The Council resolution was preceded, in July 2010, by resolution in the UN General Assembly. The resolution, an initiative of Bolivia, "recognizes the right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation as a human right that is essential for the full enjoyment of life and all human rights".

What do these statements mean for the one billion people suffering from lack of access to an improved water source, and the 2.6 billion without access to improved sanitation?

Indeed the resolutions provide useful tools for those who work to extend access. By recognising access as a human right, access is not only seen as a need to be fulfilled but as an entitlement for everyone, also those who face physical, institutional, cultural, language or other barriers in society. Human rights prohibit discrimination and they focus on situations of systematic exclusion. What more is, participation in decision-making processes is a key component of any human right. These are some of the sides to the right to water and sanitation that have the potential to change billions of lives. But first, States themselves have to come up with strategies on how they will work to implement the right.

At the next session of the Human Rights Council, the Independent Expert Catarina de Albuquerque, who has been working since 2008 with sorting out all the question marks in the debate on the right to water and sanitation, will present her final report to the Council with recommendations. This will take place in Geneva in late February –early March. The council will then decide whether her mandate will be prolonged and governments who are still hesitant about these human rights will have an opportunity to follow her recommendations and unanimously support the right to water and sanitation.

Some governments, including the Swedish, persist in saying that making access to water and sanitation human rights is not the best way to help people in the South. The best way to solve their problem is through development cooperation. In their scenario, because the lack of water is common, and society’s institutions are not well equipped and developed, Courts will be overloaded as masses of unserved people will claim their right. However, in countries that have recognised the right, this has not been the case.

I cannot help but wonder why developing rule of law and good governance cannot be done in parallel with strengthening legal obligations. Supporting institutions and judiciary systems, while working with those who lack water and sanitation to know their rights and who is responsible goes hand in hand in other issues. Just because many husbands beat their wives, and many wives therefore could take their husbands to court, we still would not dream of giving up freedom from violence as a human right. Human rights set a standard, so that we know what to work for.

by Ann-Marie Karlsson, Project Officer, Swedish Water House

The United Nations Convention on Climate Change (COP16) is drawing to an end and the world is still waiting for a binding agreement on climate policy. While there is still hope for an eventual deal on mitigation policies, it is time to recognize that climate change is already upon us and that additional budgets and adaptive solutions will be necessary to deal with the consequences.

Climate change increases the likelihood of extreme weather events and the resulting natural disasters. The floods in Pakistan that directly affected 20 million people this summer are a striking example. Yet, while the storms and floods make the headlines it is the after-effects that may take the greatest toil. In Pakistan, a widespread waterborne disease outbreak following the floods has so far been avoided, but the current situation in Haiti proves that sustained action must be taken in post-disaster areas to prevent the spread of disease. In October, ten months after the earthquake, cholera was detected in Haiti. As of December 4, the Haitian Ministry of Public Health & Population reported a total of 93,222 hospital visits and 2,120 deaths due to cholera. Waterborne diseases such as cholera will be one of the most significant risk factors resulting from climate-change disasters. Currently, 5000 children die a day from diarrhoeal diseases that are closely linked to lack of hygiene, clean water and proper management of human waste. In a changing world where extreme weather events destroy or compromise the functionality of our sanitation systems, these numbers are likely to be even higher.

Adapting to climate change means major changes in how vital systems, such as sanitation, in our society are managed.  If major waterborne disease outbreaks as a result of climate change are to be avoided, many nations, especially in developing countries, will need support in adapting sanitation systems to manage the source of disease, wastewater. However, to date donor spending on sanitation and water is very low. Today, Sweden spends less than 2.5% of the state’s aid budget on sanitation and water, down from 5% several years ago. If we are to overcome the challenges of climate adaptation this figure will need to be higher. Similarly, technology innovation in the sector is low and today’s sanitation systems are generally inflexible, fixed infrastructures with little variation across the globe. In the future, we will need flexible technical solutions that can be implemented quickly in post-disaster areas or adapt to prolonged droughts.

There are opportunities for Swedish actors to support this change, both by lobbying for better sanitation policy and funding, and through the development of innovative and adaptive sanitation solutions. The initiative of Peepoople (collaboration SLU and KTH) is one example of Swedish researchers testing the limits of traditional sanitation services and offering possibilities to sterilize human waste in a fast and infrastructure-free manner.  More work is needed to make sanitation systems more flexible to varying water flows resulting from climate change. Other adaption possibilities include coupling sanitation systems to the energy grid (biogas) or decoupling the centralized system to smaller treatment centres during crisis periods. Climate change may be the opportunity we have been waiting for to finally take our pioneering ideas for new sanitation systems off the shelf and put them into reality. The world is waiting.
 

by Jennifer McConville, Chalmers