WaterAid launched its upcoming flagship initiative, titled “Resilient Water Accelerator”, and organized a roundtable where representatives from the climate and water-sector actors urged proper attention to address climate impacts on water and water sanitation and hygiene (WASH) at Sonargaon hotel in Dhaka on Tuesday.
According to a press release, speakers of Road to COP27 highlighted the need for the world to act now to protect communities from the impacts of climate change claiming that the progress is too slow. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) proposed the “low-regrets” adaptation solutions stating that water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) services will make vulnerable communities more resilient.
According to the speakers, WASH services will reduce vulnerability to climate impacts, and help close the gap on gender, education, prosperity and health inequalities. 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.
At the roundtable, a set of recommendations were jointly put forward for the proposed national budget for the fiscal year 2022-2023.
They are – ensuring wealthy countries more than double their public finance for adaptation from 2019 levels by 2025; balancing the climate funding for adaptation to match amounts for mitigation; addressing the structural inequalities – particularly for the groups who are the most vulnerable – that are being compounded by climate change; supporting approaches that address whole WASH systems to ensure sustainability and reliability by prioritizing long-term management and funding to keep WASH services reliable, communities will have essential services during and after climate impacts; adopting locally led adaptation principles as the most impactful approach for building adaptation and resilience to climate change.
Malik Fida, managing director, CEGIS, stated: “Plans which are guiding the vision of Bangladesh in adaptive measures to tackle climate change need 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 programs that centers people and community. Ensuring these mechanisms will aid direct impact in society.”
Dr Fazle Rabbi Sadeque Ahmed, PKSF, mentioned: “Water has to get the highest priority, future projects need to align with national strategies, priority must be 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, said: “We are now living in the era of loss and damage, and when we talk about climate justice, we must ensure accessible, financially solvent solutions to address the water crisis.”
Adnan Qader, advocacy officer, WaterAid said: “Globally WaterAid signed up to the principles for locally led adaptation action. Solutions to address the water crisis must be local and the Resilient Water Accelerator will be a multi-sectoral approach and stepping stone to address those problems, putting people first. We must ensure adaptation finance reaches the local communities and hopefully our initiative will address that.”
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 bold and ambitious actions to address climate change and we have played our part. We request everyone to put dedicated attention to addressing the hard-to-reach people towards achieving climate justice for all.”
