Crosscutting Areas

This study provides practical insights and recommendations to water companies as well as for consumer bodies, regulators, policymakers, and the water industry more widely, aiming to enable the industry to take positive steps to address the challenge of water poverty. Chapter 6 in particular, "Approach Toolkit for Alleviating Poverty" while focusing on the UK water sector, could be useful in any part of the world.

The Water and Sanitation for Health Facility Improvement Tool (WASH FIT) is a facility-led risk-based approach which focuses on implementing incremental improvements over time to improve quality of care. When a climate-lens is applied to WASH FIT, risk assessments can identify triggers and provide warning signs to facility management teams to help them to develop mitigation measures for future climate-related events. The target audience are WASH and Health specialists and managers interested in planning for new, or upgrade existing WASH services in health care facilities.

This tool and its proposed methodology set out an approach for conducting risk assessments for the WASH sector covering a wide range of hazard groups affecting the sector, as well as climate change related risks in more detail. The tool is a resource for the WASH sector as a whole. While it focuses primarily on rural WASH services encompassing small-scale and community systems, the approach can be applied to both rural and urban settings.