NBS, including green infrastructure, adopts or mirrors natural systems and processes to improve water availability (e.g., groundwater recharge) and water quality (e.g., natural and constructed wetlands), and to reduce risks from water-related disasters and climate change (e.g., green roofs).

However, the reality is that much of the water management practice has been traditionally dominated by human-built, grey infrastructure. As such, the potential for NBS remains under-utilized. Green infrastructure — as an approach that protects, restores or mimics the natural water cycle and other ecosystem services — has the power to replace, enhance or work in parallel with grey infrastructure in a cost-effective manner. NBS shows potential in achieving progress toward sustainable food production, improved human settlements, access to water supply and sanitation, water-related disaster risk reduction and responding to the impacts of climate change on water resources. Development solutions that integrate ecosystem structure and function will inherently realize cost savings as these approaches conserve and sustain both the natural resource base and the environment, in addition to the infrastructure on which human settlements depend.

Growing interest in NBS is reflected in how it is increasingly incorporated into policy developments in the management of water resources, biodiversity, urban settlements and many other sectors. As we approach the 2030 Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) deadline (the targets set to provide universal coverage for WASH, or “water, sanitation and hygiene”), the focus is rightly turning toward common objectives and supportive actions in line with these SDG policy priorities.

The real challenge is finding effective ways to blend green and grey interventions that optimize return on investments, maximize efficiencies and minimize costs. WWDR 2018 addresses these points head on and identifies four conditions that need to be met in order to scale uptake:

• Leveraging financing: The need for broader application of NBS can be met with a special call for redirecting and making more effective use of existing financial instruments, such as green bonds.
• Enabling environments for regulation and law: The existing framework for water management is based on a grey-infrastructure approach mindset; so at best, NBS tends to be an afterthought. NBS needs to be promoted more effectively through existing regulatory regimes, rather than creating them anew.
• Improving cross-sectoral collaboration: The nature of NBS requires a much higher degree of collaboration across institutions than grey-infrastructure approaches, as well as better harmonization across economic, social and environmental policy agendas. Policy champions are key in fostering this type of collaboration.
• Improving the knowledge base: Science, evidence and examples from practical application all provide much-needed proof for decision-makers on the feasibility of NBS. As a sector, we need to do a much better job in documenting and articulating the benefits and steps involved in changing practice.

The last point — application and uptake — is the cornerstone of these four preconditions. Without it, little will practically change on the ground, even if the three other preconditions are satisfactorily met.

To this end, USAID has recognized the importance green infrastructure plays in sustaining ecosystem services and has developed practical guidance for decision-makers involved in the planning and design of these solutions. In support of USAID, ArchTam developed the Green Infrastructure Resource Guide^[1] that defines green infrastructure, outlines how it can help communities adapt to human and environmental stress, and introduces 12 benefits that are associated with specific interventions. Interventions such as groundwater recharge to managing soil slope stabilization are reviewed in detail, including specific engineering-design options that can be implemented. The guide concludes with a discussion about how green infrastructure can be applied at various scales, in different settings and under what conditions.

ArchTam has implemented the green infrastructure concepts outlined in the resource guide on USAID-funded projects, demonstrating their importance and how they can enhance and protect natural resources. Through the USAID PARA-Agua project in Peru and Colombia, ArchTam helped communities and water-user groups improve their knowledge base by gathering and analyzing climate and watershed data to enable effective decision making on appropriate green infrastructure design options, and helped develop financial instruments to fund them.

On the USAID Be Secure project in the Philippines, ArchTam promoted effective integrated water-resources-management approaches to safeguard downstream city water supplies. Green infrastructure interventions linking best practices in upper watersheds with downstream water supplies demonstrated the importance of NBS to city water security and climate readiness.

As the WWDR concludes, “increased deployment of NBS is central to meeting the key contemporary water resources management challenges… Without a more rapid uptake of NBS, water security will continue to decline.”

This call should encourage us all to “go green,” not only during events such as World Water Day, but also consistently throughout our work. As such, ArchTam continues to seek opportunities to apply green infrastructure and NBS approaches through our USAID-funded programs and other projects.

This blog post is part of a series celebrating Earth Day 2018.

[1] USAID’s Green Infrastructure Resource Guide was co-authored and co-designed by ArchTam’s Stephen Blanton, Iulia Barbu, Meg Findley, Aaron Weieneth, Elizabeth Durfee, Melissa Hess, Jason Matus and Gina DeSimone. It is the successful result of joint collaboration across multiple ArchTam offices. 

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ArchTam has a longstanding relationship with these organizations. Combined, my colleagues have donated more than US$1.1 million and volunteered hundreds of hours to help them achieve their missions.

As director of our International Development group’s Water Services business in the U.S., I’m familiar with these organizations’ important work and leadership in the water supply, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) sector. I’m excited about our partnerships because of the incredible value they will bring to the WASH sector in developing countries and what they mean to our promise to deliver a better world.

Water For People

I was first introduced to Water For People in the mid-2000s. The organization had been around for 15 years, building out needed water infrastructure and facilities and working hand-in-hand with communities. It was under the dynamic leadership of Ned Breslin (and now Eleanor Allen) that Water For People reinvented itself as a market-leading, innovative and creative disruptor in the WASH sector.

Through an Everyone, Forever impact model, Water For People aims to reach all members in the communities in which they work to guarantee sustainable infrastructure. Everyone, Forever focuses on co-investing, capacity building, monitoring, reporting and replication, and has quickly become a standard for sustainable programming. Water For People is an early adopter of new technology (such as Akvo Flow — a data collection and monitoring tool), bringing real-time monitoring to game-changing WASH interventions.

These programming principles are ones our International Development group is also working to advance. We’re expanding our services in developing countries and using cutting-edge solutions to provide real-time information and long-term benefits.

Engineers Without Borders USA (EWB-USA)

One of my professional interests is supporting capacity strengthening of WASH institutions. I’m a firm believer that we can’t just “fix the pipes,” we must enable and empower the institutions responsible for fixing the pipes. EWB-USA focuses on communities first to ensure lasting change.

Studies by the International Water Association point to a tremendous deficit in trained personnel internationally — there are simply not enough appropriately skilled water professionals to support the attainment of universal access to safe water and sanitation. In Mozambique, for example, double the number of trained professionals is needed to meet the Sustainable Development Goals set by the United Nations. At the heart of EWB-USA’s success is a belief in mentoring local community members, staff and experience exchanges, and embedding expertise to help address capacity gaps.

At ArchTam, we have some of the best expertise in our industry. Providing company support to employees who volunteer with organizations such as EWB could greatly impact this skills gap.

I’m proud that ArchTam has taken a stand to support these organizations. These partnerships will help us achieve our shared vision to improve lives and transform communities. If you wish to contribute, please make a one-time donation through the ArchTam giving sites for Water For People and EWB-USA. Or… consider becoming a volunteer yourself!

To learn more about ArchTam’s work with EWB-USA and Water For People, as well as our Corporate Responsibility platform — Blueprint for a Better World — visit: www.archtam.com/about-aecom/corporate-responsibility.

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Many cities struggle to deal with the most basic municipal task of managing human excreta. Urban population growth continuously outpaces gains in improved sanitation access. Globally, nearly one billion people live in urban slums with poor or no sanitation, and only 26 percent of urban excreta is deemed to be safely managed. Environmental degradation is one result. Endemic disease leads to mortality and morbidity, especially among children, poor school attendance and performance, low productivity, constraints on the delivery of essential urban services such as housing, transport, safe water and drainage, and ultimately limits on economic growth and urban development. In short, a silent crisis that impedes the realization of the urban transformation framed in SDG11.

Urban sanitation has a fundamental role to play in achieving the SDG goals identified above. Business as usual operates at too small a scale and focuses on infrastructure alone rather than on city-wide solutions. What is required is a radical shift in mindsets and practices towards an urban sanitation approach that impacts political priorities, funding, planning, design, management and governance.

This radical shift will require the engagement of all stakeholders and a political transformation that touches all citizens, rich and poor, informal and formal, to facilitate the rollout of universal urban sanitation services. This is critical not only for reasons of equity and the human right to sanitation, but also because the consequences of inadequate sanitation eventually affect everyone, as excreta-related pathogens spread easily across dense urban environments.

To make progress, urban development professionals and stakeholders need to better understand how sanitation impacts the functions and form of the city and how it supports economic development and promotes equity. To achieve sustainable, equitable and safe management of excreta for the whole city, sanitation sector professionals must transform their thinking and practices to deploy both old and new solutions in smarter ways.

We need to come together as a professional community to galvanize this agenda by sharing conversations globally and mobilizing contributions from decision-makers and other practitioners across disciplines. Such a renewed urban sanitation agenda should aim to:

• Embed sanitation within the framework of urban governance and municipal services provision;
• Establish clear roles and responsibilities, with accountability and transparency;
• Provide safe management of excreta throughout the sanitation chain – for both onsite sanitation and sewers – to ensure separation of fecal contamination from people across the whole city;
• Focus on outcomes rather than technologies – allowing for diversity of solutions and approaches;
• Base decisions on secure operational budgets being available (including for operation and maintenance);
• Facilitate progressive realization, building on what is already in place;
• Commit resources to training city leaders and technicians of the future to solve complex problems rather than deliver predetermined solutions.

On this year’s World Toilet Day, I invite you to consider your own practice in responding to this shared responsibility.

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Back to the future

Non-networked solutions and approaches, like fecal-sludge management services, have captured the imagination and interest of the water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) sector, not least because they offer a viable, interim step towards the ‘safely managed’ goals of U.N. Sustainable Development Goal 6 (SDG6). While non-networked urban sanitation has been at the margins of the industry for 20+ years, I’d argue a tipping point has now been reached, and it was noticeable how donors, government and others crowded onto this topic. From the work a few years back around Excreta Flow Diagrams (EFDs), which seek to diagnose bottlenecks by mapping flows of fecal waste in a city, the focus has now shifted to mainstreaming Fecal Sludge Management (FSM) services into policy, regulation and, by-laws (Warangal City, India is a good example of how monitoring FSM service providers is now written into local municipal by-laws).

Smart subsidies, smarter finances

Harmonized and sequenced financing for WASH was pointed to as a precondition for success in the sector. This seemed to reopen discussion about the management of public financing in the sector, where most effectively to target subsidies, and how best to incorporate private financing into service provision in a way that opens up opportunities for public financing instruments. Amongst others, the World Bank was forcefully arguing for blended financial approaches to reach the SDG6 goal – in short, a creative combination of commercial and concessional financing.

WaterWise cities

Urban water scarcity, resilience to extreme weather events, and a push for integrated urban water management remained high on the technical agenda at Water Week. The principles of WaterWise cities were referenced repeatedly. For those advocating this, it means nothing less than ensuring water is integrated in city planning and design to increase resilience to climate change and improve livability, efficiencies, and a sense of place for urban communities. Ben Furmage at the Cooperative Research Center (CRC) for Water Sensitive Cities showed that Australian experience remains at the cutting edge in this space. The International Water Association’s 17 principles of WaterWise cities offered practical guidance on what water practitioners need to do and how and when they can do it.

Green is the new grey

There is a steady if slow recognition by policy makers that ecosystems can be viewed as green infrastructure (GI) that generates economic gains, supports water supply quantity and quality, and helps reduce water-related disasters. The blending of green and grey infrastructure in practice is supported by more and better economic valuation of GI and examples of positive integration of green and grey into national planning processes. In Stockholm, much of the discussion on this subject pivoted around the need to harmonize language – GI is relatively new in engineering circles – and to find better ways to monitor the benefits of GI (given its generally fragmented/dispersed siting).

City Wide Inclusive Sanitation

One current trend in the WASH sector relates to better planning for urban sanitation service provision. SDG6 will not be met without a concerted approach to service provision in small towns and the informal parts of larger cities. City Wide Inclusive Sanitation (CWIS) addresses this need by calling for sanitation professionals to, if I can adapt a famous John F. Kennedy quote, “Ask not what our city can do for our sanitation program, but ask what our sanitation program can do for our city.” The focus is thereby on delivering sustainable cities (SDG11) with a contribution from sanitation initiatives (SDG 6). For sanitation professionals, this means blending both conventional and new solutions in innovative ways, considering both reticulated and onsite approaches, taking account of the needs and resources of customers, including the poor, and linking sanitation solutions to broader urban development priorities. The CWIS initiative is debunking myths and asking that urban development professionals better coordinate their mandates across the city – incorporating sanitation into land use planning (i.e. housing, drainage, solid waste and other programs) more effectively. Watch this space.

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