This short reflection piece looks at examples of the human right to sanitation in war zones, refugee camps and flood events. It also outlines some connections to the European policy context and links between the human right to sanitation, climate resilience and biofuel production. This text provides a brief overview of some important and underesearched themes linked to climate change and green transition policy. The EU Horizon-funded GreenPaths project (2023-2026) is currently researching the social impacts of green transition policy across Europe and in the Global South.
November 19 is World Toilet Day. For 2024, the theme is ‘Toilets – A Place for Peace’, which highlights the precarity of access to safe, private, dignified and hygienic toilets, washing facilities and menstrual hygiene management (MHM) for populations in war zones, at risk of conflict, natural disaster and extreme weather events. The World Toilet Day 2024 campaign calls on governments to ensure that sanitation and water services are resilient, effective, accessible to everyone and shielded from harm (UN Water, 2024).
Pathogens from human faeces contribute to diarrheal diseases that kill around 1000 children every day worldwide (WHO/UNICEF, 2023), whilst 3.5 billion people lack access to safely managed sanitation. World Toilet Day 2024 emphasises damage to sanitation infrastructure, environmental and human health during conflicts, extreme weather events and disasters. When crises hit, Water Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) are key and urgent concerns, particularly where the spread of infectious disease and lack of water are factors.
Sanitation is a human right that touches many aspects of our daily lives: it is an essential human need that crosses social and cultural barriers, linked by underlying determinants of health, dignity and public welfare. It is a right that applies across the full Sanitation Value Chain (SVC), at stages of containment, emptying, transport, treatment and reuse/disposal of human waste and wastewater. Which are all imperilled during times of crisis.
The human right to sanitation, alongside a plethora of other social, cultural, civil and political rights for refugees, Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) and those devastated by conflicts, natural disasters and extreme weather events are often caught within power vacuums of governance. In such spaces, rhetoric from international law regarding state obligations to provide maximum available resources towards rights realisation ring hollow in the chaos of jurisdiction gaps and zones of statelessness, where populations cannot approach their local municipality and demand services.
Humanitarian efforts to meet basic needs are often hampered by geo-political wrangling at the international level, alongside issues of distribution of relief funds and goods on the ground. The Emergency WASH Knowledge Portal, a shared resource by humanitarian development agencies, offers an interactive open source eCompendium of sanitation technology solutions in different emergency settings and methodologies for planning and decision-making processes around the design and implementation of WASH solutions across three central phases: acute response, stabilisation and recovery.
Access to sanitation interventions and associated data gathering are rooted in the global development targets of SDG 6 Clean Water and Sanitation: Ensure the availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all. However, the targets of SDG 6 were not designed for conflict zones, refugee camps and the aftermath of natural disasters or extreme climate events. This leaves gaps in data about the human right to sanitation for vulnerable populations, which to some extent can be supplement by household WASH Multiple Indicator Cluster (MIC) surveys and Rapid Assessment Tools like WASH ‘Em.
As of May 2024, 60% of WASH facilities in Gaza were destroyed or damaged. An October 2024 WASH cluster assessment by the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA) reports rapidly deteriorating water and sanitation conditions, with nearly half the population lacking water, alongside an increased spread of related diseases, such as diarrhoea and skin infections in young children (WASH Cluster, 2024). In addition, basic sanitation supplies, including MHM products, are increasingly unavailable (UNICEF, 2024).
Providing safe WASH is particularly challenging in the fluid and resource-limited contexts of refugee and Internally Displaced Peoples (IDP) camps. The Metche Camp in Chad has received 40,000 refugees from Sudan and is lacking in water, food, shelter and basic sanitation. Specific solutions for emergency humanitarian WASH relief are designed by experts to fill the void with short-term solutions. For example, Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh is the world’s largest refugee camp, which includes around a million Rohingya refugees from Myanmar. Schmitt et al. (2020) found that key to improving safe menstrual hygiene was to improve the provision of products, information and maintenance of WASH facilities with methodologies for participatory and female-driven consultation in their design and construction. However, when these settings can become semi-permanent and extend into decades of stasis, then any progress on improving conditions for sanitation is limited, as infrastructure cannot be fully developed and sustained.
Flood risk and damage is an ongoing threat to safe sanitation. A recent blog by researchers at the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) highlights the additional risk posed to low-income communities. For example, in Bangladesh over 40% of the population or 70 million people live in flood risk regions where the resources needed to repair and recover from flooding are lacking, whilst exposure to outbreaks of cholera or dengue is heightened. “Sanitation systems face increasing challenges due to climate change: cyclones (set to increase in intensity with climate change) destroy latrines; and flooding can cause sewers, septic tanks, and drainage systems to overflow” (Liera et al., 2024). Handled incorrectly, a public health crisis can compound an environmental one, as seen in Haiti’s 2010 earthquake and subsequent Cholera outbreak.
The connections between toilets and climate change may not appear obvious at first, but in addition to the threats to public health due to poor sanitation, there are growing links between sanitation, energy demand and human rights in context of the EGD, SDG 6 and the generation of biofuels from human waste. As a researcher on the GreenPaths project, this involves considering the policy-impact implications of new technologies, including how biofuel-related policy development can navigate climate risk.
As Liera et al. (2024) point out, the combination of climate mitigation and resilience are essential to protecting WASH infrastructure, as found in the work of the Climate Resilient Sanitation Coalition, a consortium of 35 organisations implementing WASH solutions in 80 countries and developing policy recommendations to integrate sanitation in climate policy. An increasingly important aspect of the SVC for climate mitigation and recovery policy relates to the by-products of human waste and the generation of biofuels, which can offer viable income streams and provide cheap, sustainable fuel for households.
In Europe, efforts to protect the rights to water and sanitation at risk of conflict, natural disaster and extreme weather events are reflected in regional and local policy. Water and sanitation are recognised as essential human needs under Principle 20 of the European of Social Rights and as such, are recognised in the EU Strategy on Adaptation to Climate Change. Toilets and safe, sustainable, climate-resilient sanitation also relate to European Green Deal targets of zero pollution. In 2022, the European Commission proposed stronger rules on groundwater pollutants and treatment of urban wastewater, including an updated Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive which emphasises EU states’ responsibilities to track industrial pollution at source to increase the possibilities of re-using sludge and treated wastewater. EU policy around biofuel production was recently strengthened in 2023 by updates to the Renewable Energy Directive. Part of GreenPaths work includes generating recommendations to improve the design, governance and implementation of policy strategies and instruments. This includes understanding public perceptions and social impacts of newly developing policy fields such as biofuels.
The concept of ‘Toilets – A Place for Peace’ calls for urgent and climate resilient sanitation. With an estimated 1.4 million people dying each year from inadequate WASH, primarily in low- and middle-income countries, diarrhoeal diseases account for 564,000 of these deaths. Most deaths associated with unsafe water and sanitation are preventable. Push your policymakers and politicians to find ways to reduce these numbers and protect WASH rights before, during and beyond times of crisis. If you can, donate to the WASH humanitarian organisations working on the ground. Or simply spread the word about this underreported human rights crisis.
Marcus Erridge, PhD, CES.