SEI and SuSanA to lead new sanitation learning & sharing platform for Gates Foundation

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has chosen the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) and the Sustainable Sanitation Alliance (SuSanA) to lead a new sanitation learning and sharing platform.

The Gates Foundation’s Sanitation Science and Technology Programme has over 80 projects. SEI and SuSanA have been tasked to share the results from these projects in an open public forum engaging a broad range of experts and the general public.

Over the next 15 months SEI will work with the Programme Grantees of the Foundation in order to broaden understanding and discussion about their work. The grantees will be encouraged to work through SuSanA that has about 200 institutional members and some 2000 discussants on its Discussion Forum (www.forum.susana.org).

In August 2012, the Foundation gave a grant to the Water and Sanitation for   Africa (WSA) to set up the Africa Sanitation Think Tank (ASTT).

Related web sites:

• Gates Foundation - Water, Sanitation & Hygiene
• SEI – Managing Environmental Systems
• SuSanA
• IRC - Sanitation

Source: SEI, 09 Nov 2012

Higher water tariffs are associated with lower water loss

“Our Smart Water Networks Forum is aiming to help water utilities do the right thing: investing in operation and maintenance and sustainability of their data-driven smart water networks and not only focusing on pipe and pumps”, Smart Water Networks Forum Chairman Guy Horowitz told IRC’s Dick de Jong at the 2011 Aquatech Amsterdam SWAN session on 1 November 2011. Inefficient water distribution and poor water efficiency are the culprits.

Mr. Horowitz is Vice President Marketing of TaKaDu, a water infrastructure monitoring software pioneer based in Israel shared recent research findings that show the connection between water prices and water loss rates. Based on information from 42 urban water networks all over the world, their research found that higher water tariffs are associated with lower water loss and a more sustainable outcome. In most cities where the price of water is very high or very low, low and high NRW (non revenue water) rates are observed respectively.

This holds true across different countries and regions and even cities. Manila East and Manila West for instance have two different private sector operators. Manila West scores 12 percent non revenue water, Manila East scores 53 percent water losses.

Thus, when setting policy and water tariffs, policy makers should consider all possible implications of low pricing to avoid infrastructure deterioration. Regulatory tools such as on-going benchmarking of water utilities and incentives for improved performance can be used, as well as a tiered pricing model for domestic consumption, TaKaDu concludes.

Related web sites:

• TaKaDu – Research
• Smart Water Networks Forum (SWAN)
• International Benchmarking Network for Water and Sanitation Utilities (IBNET)
• IWA Water Loss Specialist Group

Related news: Dick de Jong, The SWAN Forum: Defining the future of Smart Water Networks, WASH News International, 02 Nov 2011

New book offers lessons for improving water management in tomorrow’s cities

As sustainability concerns regarding water management in cities continue to increase, the challenge facing cities is for them to do more with less. SWITCH, an EU-funded programme, was a five year experiment focused on some of the key sustainability challenges in urban water management. In a number of cities around the globe, it set out to test what was needed to transition into more sustainable urban water management through a combination of demand-led research, demonstration activities, multistakeholder learning and associated training and capacity building.

The book- SWITCH in the City: putting urban water management to the test brings together experiences from 12 cities involved in the SWITCH project from four continents (Accra, Alexandria, Beijing, Belo Horizonte, Birmingham, Bogotá, Cali, Hamburg, Lima, Lodz, Tel Aviv and Zaragoza) with a set of guidelines focused on promoting stakeholder engagement in such processes.

If you are interested in undertaking demand-led research, promoting multi-stakeholder engagement, and scaling up research impacts, not only in urban water management but also in other areas where we find such complex problems, then download or order your copy now through IRC- International Water and Sanitation Centre.

Climate change: water supply in developing countries will be hit hardest

Adapting raw industrial and domestic water supply to climate change could cost US$ 12 billion per year, with up to 90% of this needed in developing countries, according to new research [1]. A research team from the Netherlands, US and UK found that the highest costs are in Sub-Saharan Africa. Though US$ 12 billion seems a lot, the team stressed that the baseline costs of meeting existing and future demand for water by 2050 in most regions were far greater than adaptation costs.

“Many studies have already shown that the developing world is particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change,” Philip Ward of the VU University Amsterdam in the Netherlands told environmentalresearchweb. “In this study we show that the costs of adaptation to climate change in the industrial and municipal water supply sector are also greater for developing countries than for developed countries, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of GDP.”

The highest climate adaptation costs were for sub-Saharan Africa, where western Central Africa is projected to dry, followed by Latin America, which is likely to see increased seasonal and interannual rainfall variability in eastern Brazil.

Before calculating the climate adaptation costs, the researchers analysed the baseline costs needed to meet existing and future demand for water by 2050 without the effects of climate change. These baseline costs also covered the elimination of existing backlogs and the consequences of socioeconomic development.

The researchers then analysed the effect of adaptation to climate change over and above this baseline, using one emissions scenario and two global climate models to project the effects of climate on water supply.

“We found that in most regions the baseline costs far exceed adaptation costs,” said Ward. “This supports the notion of mainstreaming climate-change adaptation, and current and future climate vulnerability, into broader policy aims. It raises the question of ‘how much climate change adaptation should be factored into the current design of water supply systems?’ “

On a global scale, the baseline costs for water supply were $73 billion per year, compared with $12 billion per year for adaptation to climate change.

The researchers fixed the cost of meeting increased demand at US$ 0.30/cubic meter, whether this was met by additional surface reservoirs or other techniques, such as desalination, recycling, or rainwater harvesting. ,

The building of reservoirs is controversial as it can cause heavy environmental and social impacts. The team’s projections indicate that under these assumptions, global reservoir storage capacity would need to increase by around 34–36% by 2050 to cope with water demand.

The researchers hope their work can assist ongoing climate negotiation, such as COP-16, the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Cancun, which ends on 10 December 2010.

[1] Ward, P.J. … [et al.] (2010). Partial costs of global climate change adaptation for the supply of raw industrial and municipal water: a methodology and application. Environmental research letters ; vol. 5, no. 4 ; 044011. doi: 10.1088/1748-9326/5/4/044011

Source: Liz Kalaughe, environmentalresearchweb, 08 Dec 2010

PLoS Medicine publishes four-part series on water and sanitation

In November 2010, PLoS Medicine, a peer-reviewed open-access journal, published a four-part series on water and sanitation.

In the first article, Jamie Bartram and Sandy Cairncross argue that the massive burden of ill health associated with poor hygiene, sanitation, and water supply is largely preventable with proven, cost-effective interventions and demands more attention from health professionals and policymakers. The total benefits of these interventions are greater than the health benefits alone and can be valued at more than the costs of the interventions. Even though hygiene, sanitation, and water supply are development priorities, the authors state that the ambition of international policy on drinking water and sanitation is inadequate.

In the second article, Paul Hunter and colleagues focus on water supply and argue that much more effort is needed to improve access to safe and sustainable water supplies. A poor water supply not only impacts health by water-related diseases but can also affect health by limiting productivity and the maintenance of personal hygiene. Reasons for the limited progress towards universal access to an adequate water supply include high population growth rates in developing countries, insufficient rates of capital investment, difficulties in appropriately developing local water resources, and the ineffectiveness of institutions mandated to manage water supplies (in urban areas) or to support community management (in rural areas).

David Trouba and colleagues discuss the importance of improved sanitation to health and the role that the health sector can play in its advocacy in the third article. Lack of sanitation contributes to about 10% of the global disease burden, causing mainly diarrhoeal diseases. In the past, government agencies have typically built sanitation infrastructure, but sanitation professionals are now concentrating on helping people to improve their own sanitation and to change their behaviour. Improved sanitation has significant impacts not only on health, but on social and economic development, particularly in developing countries. The authors believe that three major strategies could achieve success in sanitation: (i) political leadership, (2) a shift from centralised supply-led infrastructure provision to decentralised, people-centred demand creation coupled with support to service providers to meet that demand, and (3) the full involvement of the health sector in sanitation through policy development and the implementation of sanitation programmes.

In the final article, Sandy Cairncross and colleagues outline what needs to be done to make significant progress in providing more and better hygiene, sanitation, and water for all. They discuss the differences between these three subsectors and the possible reasons for poor rates of progress towards achieving universal access in recent years. The actors whose engagement is essential for the sector, include the poor households themselves who are significant investors, local and central government, donors, and international agencies. The active involvement of health professionals in hygiene, sanitation, and water supply is crucial to accelerating and consolidating progress for health, argue the authors. They propose a detailed Agenda for Action for seven domains: health policy, health institutions, health research, health surveillance, health delivery programmes, health protection regulations and standards, and health advocacy.

Since publication, between 9 and 16 November 2010, the four articles together have been viewed 13,000 times, with most views (5,400) going to the first article by Jamie Bartram and Sandy Cairncross.

Free access to over 100 research articles on water – offer ends 23 April 2010

In support of World Water Day 2010, publisher Routledge is offering free access to over 100 research articles related to sustaining healthy ecosystems, increasing water quality, access to clean water and contemporary challenges in water management. These articles are available free until the 23rd April 2010.

Journal titles include: Water International, International Journal of Water Resources Development, Development in Practice, Hydrological Sciences Journal, Third World Quarterly, Environmental Politics, Gender & Development (special issue on Water), Knowledge Management for Development Journal (special issue on Learning for the Water Sector) and International Journal on Environmental Studies (special isssue on Greywater)

See the full listing.

Rotavirus data must propel immunization – experts

Health experts hope the release of data showing the success of rotavirus vaccine will help compel policymakers to ensure all children will be immunized.

Rotavirus – the top cause of severe and often fatal diarrhoea and dehydration in children – kills some 527,000 children a year globally, nearly half of them in sub-Saharan Africa.

“It is our hope that these data will catalyze action so that one day we can live in a world where no child dies from diarrhoea,” Kathy Neuzil, senior clinical advisor for vaccines at the international health non-profit PATH, said in a 27 January statement.

Published on 27 January 2010 in the New England Journal of Medicine, results from first-ever clinical trials in South Africa and Malawi show that a live, oral rotavirus vaccine significantly reduces the episodes of severe rotavirus gastroenteritis in African children during the first year of life.

The data “provide policymakers with the critical information they need to make decisions about rotavirus vaccine introduction,” George Armah, professor and rotavirus expert at Ghana’s Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research, said.

The trial results led the World Health Organization in June 2009 to recommend global use of the vaccine.

The Africa trials focused on the vaccine’s performance in high mortality, low-income settings, according to a 27 January 2010 communiqué by PATH and GAVI Alliance.

Health experts point out that while rotavirus infection in treatable, it has devastating and deadly impact in rural and poor areas where people cannot access medical care. “Vaccines represent the best hope for preventing the severe consequences of rotavirus infection,” Nigel Culiffe of University of Liverpool said in statement.

The trials were coordinated and co-funded through a partnership between GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals and the GAVI Alliance-funded Rotavirus Vaccine Trials Partnership – PATH, WHO and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Source: IRIN, 27 Jan 2010

Gates Foundation awards $10.9 million to study impacts of sanitation on diseases

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have received a five-year, $10.9 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to evaluate several interventions to combat diarrheal disease in developing countries.

Dr. Jack Colford

Dr. Jack Colford, professor of epidemiology at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health, will coordinate the project, working with the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR,B) and Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA).

An estimated 2.2 million children under the age of 5 die from diarrhoeal diseases each year, according to the World Health Organization. Most of these diseases are thought to be preventable with improvements in sanitation, water quality and hygiene.

Due to the high cost of developing and maintaining large infrastructure projects, such as networked water, there is now a movement toward simpler, alternative methods to improve health in rural areas. However, there is almost no evidence that allows direct comparison of the health benefits or cost effectiveness of these simpler interventions, such as improved latrines, household water treatment and hand washing with soap.

The goal of the new project is to determine how sanitation interventions, delivered alone or as part of combined intervention packages, impact child health and well-being. In addition to improved sanitation, the intervention packages will include drinking water improvements and hand washing solutions. The results have the potential to influence how billions of dollars are directed towards long-term improvements in health and economic outcomes for millions of children each year, said Colford.

“Increasingly, foundations, governments, the World Bank and development agencies such as the MCC (Millennium Challenge Corporation) are demanding evidence of effectiveness when awarding development funds,” said Colford. “Right now, it is unknown whether single interventions are as cost effective as combinations of these interventions. This grant will fund the first large-scale, randomized impact evaluation designed to gather rigorous evidence about this question.”

The study will test the impact of these sanitation, water and hygiene interventions using a large-scale, randomized impact evaluation in Bangladesh and Kenya. These two countries are representative of the two regions that account for the majority of the world’s gastrointestinal disease burden: Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The researchers expect to enroll a total of 23,000 children in the trials, which will be monitored by several institutional review boards.

Of the $10.9 million, about $7.9 million will be subcontracted out to the two field sites. Dr. Stephen Luby, head of the Programme on Infectious Diseases and Vaccine Sciences with ICDDR,B, and Michael Kremer, Ph.D., a research affiliate with IPA, will lead the trials in Bangladesh and Kenya, respectively. They will be joined by a team of experts from various disciplines, including public health, economics, behavioral change, nutrition, cognitive development and tropical enteropathy.

Source: Linda Anderberg, UC Berkely News, 05 Nov 2009

Climate change: high adaptation costs for water sector, World Bank study says

“Water supply and flood management, ranks as one of the top three climate adaptation costs in both the wetter and drier scenario, with Sub-Saharan Africa footing by far the highest costs” says a new World Bank report.

The draft global report of the Economics of Adaptation to Climate Change Study (EACC) calculates the cost between 2010 and 2050 of adapting to an approximately 2°C warmer world by 2050. A second report due in March 2010 will consist of seven country case studies (Bangladesh, Bolivia, Ethiopia, Ghana, Mozambique, Samoa, and Viet Nam).

The EACC study estimates that over the next 40 years, global net annual adapation costs for municipal and industrial water supply will be between US$ 10.0 billion (wetter scenario) and US$ 11.1 billion (dry scenario). In both scenarios, nearly two-thirds of these costs (US$ 5.9 billion and US$ 7.3 billion, respectively) are for Sub-Saharan Africa [tab. 13, p. 54].

“Costs of adaptation are defined as the cost of providing enough raw water to restore future industrial and municipal water demand to the levels that would have existed without climate change. Such demand is assumed to be met by increasing the capacity of surface reservoir storage, except when that would raise withdrawals to more than 80 percent of river runoff and when the cost of supplying water from reservoir yield is more than $0.30 a cubic meter. In these cases, supply is assumed to be met through alternative measures, such as recycling, rainwater harvesting, and desalination, at a cost of $0.30 a cubic meter” [p. 53].

The adaptation cost for water supply and flood management in the EACC study is higher than previously calculated by United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) in 2007. The World Bank says this is because it has tried to include a number of costs that UNFCC overlooked, such as the costs of maintaining water quality standards and operating costs [p. 82-83].

“As do most sectoral studies of global adaptation costs, [EACC] study focuses on hard adaptation measures, which are easier to cost than behavioral measures. There is no implication that these are the best measures for adaptation. Ideally, adaptation options to ensure water supply during average and drought conditions should integrate strategies on both demand and supply sides. While demand-side adaptations are not explicitly costed in this study (demand projections already account for some increase in efficiencies over time, so this could lead to double counting), there is wide scope for economizing on water consumption” [p. 55].

Global adapation costs for water supply and sanitation infrastructure were estimated to be US$ 700 million per year [tab. 8, p. 44].

Average annual adaptation costs in the health sector for diarrhoea and malaria prevention and treatment lie in a narrow range of US$ 1.3–1.6 billion a year over the 40-year period 2010–50, according to the EACC study. These estimates for malaria and diarrhea are lower than the prior estimates of US$ 4–12 billion, because they take into account the effects of development and the resulting decline in under-five mortality [p. 66-68].

Though adaptation is costly, costs can be reduced, says the World Bank. “The clearest opportunities to reduce the costs of adaptation are in the water supply and flood protection sector. [...] A large share of the costs of adaptation in the water supply and flood protection sector could be avoided by adopting better management [and water tariff] policies” [p. 94-95].

One important lesson that the report mentions is that “development is the most powerful form of adaptation”. It suggests too that the costs of adaptation may also be dramatically reduced by a combination of technical change and private initiative.

SODIS under fire: study pours cold water on solar disinfection

“Doubt has been cast on a much-lauded method of disinfecting water using only sunlight, after a study found that it doesn’t reduce diarrhoea among children in families using the technique” SciDev.net reports.

“Solar Water Disinfection (SODIS), a low-cost water purification method that uses only sunlight to disinfect water, is currently used by about three million people in 30 countries, according to the SODIS Reference Centre [at SANDEC] in Switzerland”.

“Laboratory and community studies have shown that the method is effective. But a PLoS Medicine study published [on 18 August 2009] on 22 rural communities in Cochabamba, Bolivia, found no significant reduction in diarrhoea among children aged five and under in families using SODIS”.

“The authors suggest that more research is needed into how the laboratory results can be replicated on the ground and until this is done they say that campaigners should be careful about advocating SODIS”.

“Mercedes Iriarte, co-author of the study and a researcher at the Water and Environmental Sanitation Centre of San Simón University, in Bolivia, told SciDev.Net that in the laboratory there is better control of all factors”.

“Iriarte says that in the laboratory, clean, clear, pH-neutral water is contaminated with known microorganisms to evaluate the method but that in the field researchers should consider other factors such as cloudiness of the water”.

“Margot Franken, a researcher with the environmental quality unit at San Andrés University in Bolivia, told SciDev.Net that low efficacy of the method could also result from inadequate exposure to sunlight”.

Compliance was also low, with only a third of families routinely treating their water in the recommended manner despite 80 per cent claiming to use SODIS at the beginning and end of the study and an intensive promotion campaign.

Link to full article in PLoS Medicine.

See a video about the study on SciVee.

Source: Cristina Pabón, SciDev.net, 31 Aug 2009

Earlier in 2009 Wolf-Peter Schmidt and Sandy Cairncross concluded that the widespread promotion of household water treatment (HWT) is premature given the available evidence. This is echoed by the latest review of impact evaluations examining effectiveness of water, sanitation and hygiene (WSH) interventions by the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie).

In a comment about the study on its website, the SODIS Reference Centre says that “numerous studies have reported health benefits of SODIS when it is correctly and consistently used”. They cite the example of a study where “the incidence of cholera during an epidemic in Kenya was 88% lower among SODIS than non-users”.

“A well-known weakness of the SODIS process is that it is often not used consistently or is used to treat only a fraction of the drinking water consumed”, the statement continues. “Beneficial health impacts associated with the use of SODIS may also be compromised by poor sanitation and hygiene. Nonetheless, we feel that people should not be discouraged from continuing to use SODIS or from adopting it unless an alternate supply of safe drinking water is available”.

The SODIS Reference Centre/Sandec has also had to respond to “allegations circulating in a number of print media in developing countries on the carcinogenic risk of (re-)using PET bottles”. These “unfounded media reports” are drawn from research that show that antimony and phthalic acid and phthalate esters can leach from PET bottles. Sandec conducts its own study, together with Empa (Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing and Research) on “the migration of organic compounds – with special focus on plasticisers – into the water contained in PET bottles bottles under typical SODIS conditions”. “According to the results of this study, the risk of negative health effects caused by reused PET bottles for SODIS treatment is negligible”. SANDEC plans to repeat the study in India “to confirm the harmless nature of the technology in a country where media reports on the dangers of PET bottles are particularly widespread”.

Source: Samuel Luzi, Reuse of PET Bottles for SODIS – Blessing or Curse?, Sandec News, no. 10, July 2009

But SODIS is not off the hook yet, as a new danger is looming. In April 2009, scientists at Goethe University found that PET plastics may contain hormone-disrupting chemicals that leach into the water, Discovery News reported. According to researchers, it now appears that some as-yet-unidentified chemicals in PET plastics have the potential to interfere with estrogen and other reproductive hormones in the same manner that bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates are suspected of doing.