Towards Sustainable Sanitation in Urban Areas: A Pragmatic Study

One of the most pressing issues facing the world today is meeting the sanitation needs of rapidly growing urban populations, which is a major obstacle to a healthy and productive urban lifestyle. About 80 million people around the world still use open defecation methods, and 700 million more do not have access to proper sanitation. The problem of unstable or nonexistent sewerage systems is becoming more acute in urban settings, particularly in dense, low-income, and informal neighbourhoods. Contributing factors include issues with toilet space, the management of septic tanks and pits that pollute open sewers and groundwater, and the absence or inability to purchase faecal sludge disposal services. Polluting lower-income urban neighbourhoods with sewage that flows into storm drains and rivers exacerbates existing inequalities. Climate change, floods, water scarcity, droughts, and rising sea levels, all of which threaten the resilience of current services, impede the progress of billions of people without access to safely managed services.

Urban sanitation has reached a turning point. Both the global community and national governments are becoming increasingly aware that traditional sewer-based sanitation systems are insufficient for certain metropolitan regions. In areas where sanitation is essential for disease prevention and risk reduction, such as neglected tropical diseases, cholera, polio, antibiotic resistance, and environmental surveillance of pathogens, the World Health Organisation (WHO) endorses partnerships between WASH and health programs. There are system failures and missed opportunities to address interconnected urban problems, such as a lack of political will, insufficient technical, financial, and institutional resources, and an unwillingness to integrate safe sanitation systems into broader urban development. This paper looks at the difficulties of establishing sanitation systems in cities and discusses strategies for making those systems more sustainable.