“Never let a good crisis go to waste,” said Winston Churchill. Like other acute stressors, the COVID-19 pandemic acts as a multiplier of chronic or pre-existing vulnerabilities, such as the challenges of servicing rapidly growing informal populations, particularly in urban settings. This multiplier effect may accelerate water insecurity at unprecedented levels. However, together with UNESCO Intergovernmental Hydrological Program (IHP), we’re reflecting on the possibility that COVID-19 can act as an accelerator of positive action toward achieving Sustainable Development Goal 6 on water. The nexus between issues and urban water security is particularly important.

The world’s water crisis worsens the impact of COVID-19

For the last twenty years, climate scientists, progressive economists, and international development experts have issued calls for action, investment, and a shift from “business as usual” to avoid the ultimate systems failure: an unlivable world. Even before the pandemic, the International Finance Corporation noted that “the global water sector was impacted by five major trends,” including global warming, increasingly widespread water stress, rapid urbanization and the growth of slums, the emergence of megacities with extensive environmental footprints, and aging infrastructure.

Taking the trends together and adding in the pandemic, making the case for investment in ensuring climate-resilient and water-sensitive urban design seems straightforward. While stemming the tide of this virus requires improved hygiene practices, an estimated 2.2 billion people lack access to potable water, and 4.2 billion lack access to safely managed sanitation services. In this way, COVID-19 is an accelerator of global water insecurity.

Paradoxically, though COVID-19 increases the importance of operational reliability in service delivery, it is expected to slow down investments in the global water sector. Competition for freshwater resources is greater than ever. The capacity to mobilize new sources and safeguard existing sources is weakened due to worldwide economic slowdowns and decreased revenue streams.

COVID-19 has forced decision-making into crisis response mode. Faced with what Alexander, De Smet and Weiss label “a potentially paralyzing volume” of “unfamiliar, high-stakes decisions” that they call “big bet” decisions, water resource management decisions have rarely been more important than they are today. Investments made today in the face of COVID-19 will help ensure safe water and sanitation for all in the coming decades. 

Fostering safe, sustainable, and accessible water for us all requires immediate action based on solid evidence, long-term planning, and significant human, financial, and technical resource commitment.

COVID-19 exacerbates existing vulnerabilities

In many nations, such as South Africa, federal mandates in response to the pandemic are limiting movement within countries. Though theoretically logical for COVID-19 mitigation, this limitation increases vulnerability for informal workers throughout the developing world, increasing household vulnerabilities with food shortages and income loss, and negatively impacting national economies when they are heavily dependent on the informal sector.

At the household level, short-term responses to COVID-19 are impacting vulnerabilities in significant, new, and unpredictable ways. Following the global health recommendations to increase water use for handwashing is challenging for many people in developing countries. Households face choices such as whether to use clean water for drinking or handwashing, for instance. Women and girls queue more frequently and for longer amounts of time to fetch more water. These necessary practices increase the risk of transmission, cause households to spend higher percentages of monthly income on water, and result in girls spending less time in school.

Grassroots organizations and small-scale entrepreneurs, such as iMoSyS in Lilongwe, Malawi, are seeing related complex challenges in the face of COVID-19. To address these challenges on the community level, iMoSyS created an innovative technology to upgrade communal taps, introducing pre-paid smart cards that can be refilled electronically and used as a contactless means of payment at water kiosks. The technology reduces reliance on specific kiosk service hours, limits in-person contact, decreases exposure time, and lowers the risk of long queues. The company has received international recognition for its innovation and has garnered significant interest in replicating the technology across Africa and beyond. 

Economic Challenges for Water Utilities

Utilities worldwide are struggling with economic viability. In the absence of emergency funding support, many will be forced to take the unpopular step of increasing water prices, which could contribute to political instability in many municipalities. Devex reports more than $7 billion in WASH-oriented, COVID-related funding at present. However, for the long-term, countries require not only emergency support in the short-term, but sustained investment. According to the World Bank, “quick action in assessing the need for financing facilities for utilities, and finding the resources to finance them, is perhaps one of the most important actions that policy makers can determine in response to the COVID-19 crisis.”

A local water utility in Mombasa, Kenya, saw significant changes in revenue patterns over the last year. Prior to COVID-19, the tourism sector and other industrial consumers made up most of the utility’s revenue. When the pandemic ground tourism to a halt, household consumers—many of whom reside in informal settlements—suddenly became the majority of the utility’s customers. An international NGO called Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor worked with the utility in Mombasa to create a low-income consumers department, which allowed the utility to expand its market base to low income/informal consumers and increased the utility’s revenue. The low-income consumers are a viable market opportunity and are paying for good quality clean water. However, these kinds of promising, long-term solutions driven by creative initiatives remain challenged by COVID-19.

Water insecurity is also present in the developed world. In California, approximately 1.6 million households have a combined water debt of $1 billion and 155,000 households owe more than $1,000 to their water departments. The diminished ability for consumers to pay is expected to directly impact the utilities’ revenue and therefore their ability to make long-term decisions regarding sustainability, infrastructure improvements, and maintenance. This phenomenon is likely to be commonplace throughout the developed world as this crisis continues. 

Investing in tomorrow’s urban water security

Obtaining urban water security requires interventions which involve multiple systems on multiple scales. UNESCO-IHP is heavily invested in improving decision making for resilient urban water futures in the long term through multiple globally recognized initiatives. W12+ supports and endorses this process by working toward effective water solutions through multi-stakeholder processes, including stakeholders from the public and private sectors, and civil society organizations. Solutions to urban water issues require the engagement of multiple sectors—from innovative finance to nature-based solutions to water reuse—and solutions must be nuanced to each context. 

With this goal in mind, several questions arise. How can existing solutions from one context be adapted for another? How can cities work together across geographic, cultural, and sectoral divides to share solutions and avoid reinventing the wheel? How can we ensure that interventions will not have negative cross-sector consequences, but will instead support other positive impacts? For example, how can we improve efforts for national food security so that we avoid drawing water away from thirsty cities?

Growing cities must devise methods to make more efficient use of available water resources. A great deal of energy, investment, and resources are being mobilized in support of a wide variety of interventions, but too much is reactive to situations created by the pandemic. Interventions are often a reassignment of existing donor funds as opposed to catalyzing new investment.

We need to step back, take stock, and act collectively in focused, coordinated, and deliberate ways. In support of this urgent need, over the next few months and through several initiatives, those of us at UNESCO-IHP and W12+ be diving into the complex questions about the interactions between COVID-19 and water security, and we’ll highlight innovative decisions being made that can lead to long-term urban water security.