Delivering universal access to sustainable and safely managed sanitation services remains a huge challenge. It is compounded by climate change and disaster risks and impacts such as the increasing variability in the water cycle, extreme weather events like storms and flooding, more frequent water-related disasters, and the unpredictability of water availability and rainfall. These impacts directly affect sanitation infrastructure, service delivery, and more importantly, the poor and vulnerable members of society disproportionately.

Policymakers and sanitation and development practitioners need to plan and implement resilient and inclusive solutions that will avoid or mitigate the risks of climate change and disasters from hampering or halting sanitation service delivery, rather than merely reacting once a disaster occurs.

How can this be done? This workshop focused on ways to embed resilience and apply integrated risk management into urban sanitation planning and implementation, illustrating problems and solutions from actual case histories. The workshop discussed the tools, information, capacity building, process changes, and institutional roles to integrate climate and disaster resilience in proposed and current sanitation infrastructure projects, with emphasis on the poor and vulnerable. Participants had the opportunity to share their specific climate change challenges and benefit from the group discussion on practical coping strategies.