Building Climate Resilience Through The Lens Of Water

At a roundtable organised by WaterAid, representatives from the climate and water sector actors urged  proper attention to address climate impacts on water and Water Sanitation and hygiene (WASH). WaterAid also launched its upcoming flagship initiative titled the “Resilient Water Accelerator”. 

Road to COP27 speakers highlighted the need for world to act now to protect communities from the impacts of climate change.The ‘low-regrets’ adaptation solutions proposed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – such as water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) services – will make vulnerable communities more resilient. WASH services will reduce vulnerability to climate impacts, and help close the gap on gender, education, prosperity and health inequalities: all of which are needed for community and individual resilience. However, these adaptation solutions need financing, but to date, this has been insufficient across the world. The IPCC identifies providing water and sanitation services as one of the most effective measures to reduce climate-vulnerability in the near-term and as a ‘low-regrets’ adaptation measure. The analysis also shows geographical inequality of WASH allocation remains significant, where cities and towns have received the highest percentage of the allocated funding compared to rural, char, hilly, and coastal areas in previous years.

Malik Fida, Managing Director, CEGIS, stated, “Plans which are guiding the vision of Bangladesh in adaptive measures to tackle climate change needs sectoral collaboration, direct linkages and knowledge with on ground reality. It is the collective responsibility of sector actors to sensitize this process and focus on locally led adaptive programmes that centers people and community. Ensuring these mechanisms will aid direct impact in the society”.

Dr. Fazle Rabbi Sadeque Ahmed, PKSF, mentioned, “Water has to get the highest priority, future project needs to align with national strategies, priority must given to governances, framework and infrastructures needs to change in such a manner that caters to drinking water. Climate finance is becoming a debt burden for countries and we must focus on grant based finance,”

Partha Hefaz Shaik, Director Policy Advocacy, WaterAid “We are now living in the era of loss and damage, and when we talk about climate justice, we must ensure accessible, financially solvent solution to address water crisis”

Adnan Qader, Avdocacy Officer, WaterAid “Globally WaterAid signed up to the principles for locally led adaptation action. Solutions to address water crisis must be local and Resilient Water Acelerator will be a multi-sectoral approach and stepping stone to address those problem, putting people first. We must ensure adaptation finance reaches the local communities and hopefully our initiative will address that.

During the event, Hasin Jahan, Country Director, WaterAid, said, “Bangladesh is committed towards sustainable water management and safe sanitation services but we slowly need to address the impact of climate change on WASH. The country has stressed the need for a bold and ambitious actions to address climate change and we have play our part. We request everyone to put dedicated attention to address the hard-to-reach people towards achieveing climate justice for all.”

At the roundtable, the following recommendations were jointly put forward for the proposed National Budget for the fiscal year 2022-2023:

• Ensure wealthy countries more than double their public finance for adaptation from 2019 levels by 2025, and balance the climate funding for adaptation to match amounts for mitigation. Increased allocations for hard-to-reach areas and redressing intra-urban allocation inequities should be a priority.
• Address the structural inequalities – particularly for the groups who are the most vulnerable – that are being compounded by climate change.
• Support approaches that address whole WASH systems to ensure sustainability and reliability. By prioritising long-term management and funding to keep WASH services reliable, communities will have essential services during and after climate impacts.
• Adopt the Locally led Adaptation Principles as the most impactful approach for building adaptation and resilience to climate change.