Episode 2: The ‘How Tough’ framework for assessing the climate resilience of water & sanitation

Our ever changing climate presents major threats to both water and sanitation services. To ensure universal access to these water and sanitation services over the long-term requires that we understand and improve system and service resilience. Resilience is NOT about building unfailing infrastructure, but rather looks at the robustness of different systems and their ability to return to normal function in a relatively short amount of time after a climate event in order to minimize the public health and environmental consequences of failure. This episode talks about a measurement framework to assess the resilience of water and sanitation to ultimately understand the vulnerability of systems in order to support action to prioritize communities, regions, technologies or management systems in resource poor environments to optimize return to system function.