 Good morning, good afternoon, good evening everyone to this panel discussion right now sorry for the delay that we have incurred because of some technical glitches. This is Charles Joseph from the headquarters of IWA. We at IWA are actively facilitating conversations around addressing the issues concerning water and sanitation service delivery, especially in the wake of climate change. And this is done through our two major initiatives, inclusive sanitation and climate smart utilities program. IWA is very delighted to host this side event at the UN23 Water Conference. This event has generated a lot of interest with more than 600 registrations from across 90 plus countries. Thank you very much for your interest. Now moving to the event, I would like to invite the moderators to convene this session. Dr. Sudeepthi Arora and Dr. Virginia Newton-Louise. Dr. Sudeepthi Arora is an accomplished environment scientist and assistant director at Dr. Bila Institute of Fire Technology in Jaipur. Sudeepthi has been greatly involved in water projects since 2010. And her recent projects are centered around wastewater-based etymology research, decentralized wastewater treatment, resource recovery, and CO waste management. She is the recipient of the IWA Grand Force Youth Action for STG-6 fellowship. Welcome Dr. Sudeepthi and you may take over. Thank you. Thank you Charles for a lovely introduction. Well, good morning from New York City. First of all, let me take the privilege of welcoming you all to this official side event of the UN Water Conference 2023. The event, Resilient and Inclusive Sanitation in Combating Climate Change Event and Extremities is especially important today. As we all know that climate change is already posing serious challenges to water and sanitation system in countries around the world. From water supply and sewage infrastructure damage to water quality degeneration and sewage spillage impacts are already being fed. So this session will definitely provide you an overview of the growing consequences of climate change, specifically on sanitation and its implication from real experiences of public, private and social sectors with an expert of panelists here from across the globe. This session will outline innovative and new adaptation options for strengthening the climate resilience which relates to sanitation governance, policies, systems and services. So now, without a delay, let me take the privilege to welcome and introduce you all to Professor Kala Vairava Mutti. Professor Kala is an internationally recognized water management expert with a particular interest in urban water issues. He has published extensively and has a strong international profile working closely with the World Bank, UN Habitat, UNESCO, GWP, IWA, CV and the EV. He has led several urban water management projects for the World Bank, the Frequent Development Bank and Asian Development Bank and now cheers UNIHE's Programme Advisory Board on Sanitation. So sir, please. Thank you. Thank you very much for the kind introduction and again apologies for the slight delay in the starting of the session. It was really my fault. I'm not very IT savvy so it took me some time to get to grips with that so my apologies for that. I'd just like to first of all say it's an honor for me to address this very esteemed group of people. So good morning, good afternoon and good evening to all the distinguished guests and panelists for this important session. As was pointed out this particular session sort of talks to two topics. It talks to the issue around climate change. And IWA is currently having a very important program called the Climate Smart Utilities Programme and connected to that it also talks around sanitation. And again IWA has a very important program called the Citywide Inclusive Sanitation Programme. As we know sanitation is something, sanitation and wastewater service and provision is often neglected in many countries in the global south. And the outcome of this neglect is that we create, because we're not managing this potentially dangerous substance which is our feces or our wastewater, we create huge problems particularly in terms of public health issues. We also degrade the natural environment somewhat and we also pollute our water bodies and so it has a negative impact on our water sources. And it's not something that we've done very well in the past and there's a lot of really interesting research that's going on, which is trying to better understand how we can improve the provision of sanitation and wastewater management. And I know it's often quoted that 80% of the wastewater that we generate is not being treated. So there's a lot of work to be done in this space. Now with climate change the situation becomes a little bit more difficult. You know we have the challenge on the one hand where we might not have enough water and not having enough water then creates problems for us to move some of the feces that we generate particularly in a city, particularly if we have centralized sewer systems. There is also a problem when we have too much water where, you know, when we are not treating this waste that people always generate, then this waste starts to get flushed into areas of, you know, into people's homes, into our water bodies, etc. So this problem of the lack of water and having too much water which climate change is obviously going to create in different parts of the world depending on where you are, it really puts a serious challenge to us in terms of sanitation and the impacts particularly to public health and then, you know, to people's human rights actually. The other interesting thing is that there's a lot of interest now in the provision of wastewater and sanitation and we often say at IWA that the next 20 years will really be the golden age where a lot of countries in the Global South will invest quite a lot of money in providing sanitation and wastewater services. And, you know, this is where we see huge opportunities, right? Because, you know, on the one side, in the Global South, you have this huge need for new infrastructure services, and that could be carbon intensive, right? And on the other side, you have this window of opportunity to do things differently, to learn if you like from some of the mistakes that the Global North made in a way that they built their infrastructure. And so we in the Global South can do things differently. We can do things in a much more energy neutral way. We can design our systems so that we have much more efficiency and we can think more about how to use water multiple times. And, you know, as I often say, the Global South leapfrogged the fixed wires of communication infrastructure so they can also avoid the slow and the costly mechanistic and heavy legacy of centralized water systems by moving to sort of much more off grid distributed flexible and circular systems. And so wastewater plays a very important role in that sort of circular thinking, because it allows you to gain value from your wastewater systems, but also to utilize water multiple times. So this connection between climate issues and wastewater management and sanitation is very clear. And I think at IWA we have this sort of very integrated perspective of how we might manage wastewater and sanitation in the future. And we're thinking very carefully with our members on how to ensure that these systems have a degree of resiliency, right? So when there are shocks, when there are failures that these systems can cope and manage and so the system doesn't collapse. And here again, we're seeing a lot of interesting research on distributed and decentralized systems, which have this ability to avoid, you know, to avoid shocks having been propagated through the entire system that tends to happen with highly centralized systems. But, you know, where you can localize much more the impacts of some of these issues. So this session is very, very important for us. And we're very pleased that we were able to get it approved by the UN at this very important conference. And we really are looking forward to listening to the various presenters and the panelists during the session. And with that, I'd like to hand over back to the moderator. I wish you all well. And I'm really looking forward to listening to some of the discussions. Thank you. Thank you, Professor Kaila, for giving us this insightful overview about the challenges that sanitation sector faces. And yes, very rightly said, the water scarcity is not the only problem. Too much water is another problem considering climate change. So yes. And also, thank you for sharing that how International Water Association seeks to support the sector to adapt to climate change. So thank you so much. So now let us begin with our panel discussion and as we have an experts of professional here with us today, who will share their insights, knowledge and learnings with us. To start with, I would like to invite Dr. Arne Paniser. He is the head of Secretariat Sustainable Sanitation Alliance to give us his opening pitch on resilient and sustainable development. Dr. Arne Paniser has been leading the resilient wash component of the GIZ Water Policy Sector Program since 2021. He has more than 25 years of professional experience in research and development project and has been a key driver in the creation of the global network, Sustainable Sanitation Alliance, also known as SOSANA. SOSANA has more than 400 partner organization and 15,000 individual members. So here I would like to invite Dr. Arne for his brief overview about the topic. Thank you so much. And I think there is a slight coming up. So this is actually taking it from Kala to say that, well, the world is warming up faster than ever before. We want to be stay below the famous one point degree Celsius mark, and we have to reduce every year by 30 gigatons to come there. And often people think about energy if it comes to climate change, transport, agriculture, food production, but actually it's as well worth looking at sanitation. The emissions from sanitation are similar to that from air travel. And so sanitation can contribute on both sides, on the mitigation side to reduce emissions. And as well if the methane and emissions are sort of used positively, then we have productive sanitation systems where we really can turn things around. There are other opportunities that from the sludge via pyrolysis you could do via a char we would have actually negative emissions where we could keep organic matter into the soil, bring it into the soil and have it there for a long time. And that will be very much under demand. Furthermore, we can have alternatives for energy intensive things like fertilizers and produce compost. If we go to the next slide in a very nutshell, we could say that sanitation must be seen as a catalyst for climate action and sustainable development rather than an obstacle. And we have many ways, many aspects that go in that direction and I think the future contributions will embark on that. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Dr. Ani, for giving us a good grounding on what is at stake and how sanitation is to be viewed as a part of climate action and indeed very well said, sanitation must be seen as an enabler of climate action and sustainable development rather than an obstacle. So as you clearly emphasized on the need of sustainable sanitation practices, there are approaches emerging in various parts of the world around sanitation in cities. In this regard, we would like to now hear from South Africa how they visualized cities to ensure safe sanitation in the face of climate change. So now I welcome Mr. Jay Bhagwan from the Water Research Commission of South Africa. Jay Bhagwan has a great experience in the field of water supply, wastewater and sanitation with a current focus on sanitation technologies for the future. He is Executive Manager of the Key Strategic Area of Water Use and Waste Management at the South African Water Research Commission. Jent has held several international positions including President of the Water Institute of Southern Africa and the Chairperson of the Ministry of Water Affairs and Forestry Water Advisory Committee among many others. So here I invite Mr. Jay to take over the sessions. Yes, good morning, good evening and thank you for this privilege. Can somebody change the slide so I can start speaking? So in my introduction, I think sanitation is very important but we need to understand that we live in this paradigm in the world where sanitation has a very binary engineering approach. So water supply and sanitation is no more an integrated approach. They are two separate elements. And we design water supply to actually feed the hunger of a very unsustainable drainage system that has huge ramifications on the climate extremes and we've seen those things happening. And what it means is that we keep going further and further away from the catchments to find water to feed this hunger. And these drainage systems which we call water bottle systems require large amounts of water to transport human waste. And in the extreme, when you have a drought, sanitation, the water crisis actually becomes a sanitation crisis. And similarly, even in the flood, the water crisis becomes a sanitation crisis. So the bigger issue around the climate issue is a sanitation issue. And the problem is that we're locked into this technology which needs to change. So we introduced the concept of sanitation sensitive designing as a disruptor. That's transition us from a very conventional sanitation approach to a more integrated sanitation approach that's based on the trajectory and the progress we have made around water sensitive design where we went from a surface water resource planning environment to a water mix. And similarly, the sanitation sensitive design, the key elements, it aligns itself to the water sensitive principles around water efficiency, water scarcity. But it integrates the water and sanitation planning but works in the direction of a pathway and Kala used the word decentralized and I'm going to say non-suit sanitation pathway that thrives on what you would call the opportunity of opening up a circular economy for sanitation where human waste is not seen as a pollutant but seen as a resource. And that directly starts impacting on this whole climate resilience and climate security element for sanitation. So this is the water sensitive planning paradigm by Brown et al. That tells you how normally cities would shape. The water supply first, then the sewer, then the stormwater and we call it a water-based cities. But with this new non-suit sanitation effect, we can build sanitation security in the face of these climate extremes and the developing countries can actually transition themselves away from, like Kala said, the wicked problems of the West to this new paradigm of a water and sanitation sensitive city. I think I'll stop there and I hope I wrote myself quite clearly. Thank you. Well, yes, you are in time and thank you very much for your crisp brief of this innovative concept of sanitation sensitive design. And just definitely it is very important as it already aligns with the key elements of the water sensitive principle. So yes, I'm sure this will be the new pathway for greater water security for cities. Well, now talking about cities that we know that India is now embarking on an urban transformation program. In connection to that, I would now like to invite Mr. Hitesh Vedya from National Institute of Urban Affairs to share with us about the forum that NIUA has conceptualized specifically for helicities. Hitesh Vedya has more than 25 years of experience in urban development policy, project formulation, implementation and program management, mainly on alignments with the UN World Bank, US Agency for International Development, USAID. Prior to joining NIUA, Hitesh was the country representative of UN Habitat India, where he was involved in providing capacity assistance to India's urban ecosystem to roll out urban flagship missions in the country. Well, I would now like to invite Mr. Hitesh for his insightful talk on the topic. Hi, good. Greetings from India, all of you. And it's really an honor to be speaking to this, I guess, getting I, you know, first of all, this workshop or this side event is happening in such a timely manner when India is right now talking about is having a presidency of G20 as National Institute of Urban Affairs, I think tank of government of India. We are the technical secretary for Urban 20. And out of six themes which we are taking up as a Urban 20 agenda, three of them align with the discussion we are having and some of the points which have been raised by previous speakers. We are talking about water security. We are talking about financing climate for the cities. And third, we are talking about leveraging local potential and energy. The idea of Urban 20 this time is how we can become more inclusive, more ambitious, more decisive and more action oriented. Our whole object is how do we convert intentions to action. And I think this side event really provides a lot of opportunity to learn so that a lot of discussion which emerged from these side events can really see a place in either the communique or the white papers to help for U20. So thank you IWA for giving this opportunity. Now, while I will talk about the forum, my only thing is over a period I'm National Institute has been working on inclusive sanitation. And I'll just point out four learnings which we have for this. And one thing which we have learned over a period of time is the demonstrative effect of a successful project really leads to a lot of reforms. And that has been a one opportunity or a learning which has really triggered a lot of reforms in India on inclusive sanitation. Second is, while we talk about it, we need to create a local buy-in for institutionalizing change. And unless the local leader at the ground level understands it does not really have a debt-triggering effect or scaling effect. Third, while we are designing these projects, we need to have adequate flexibility and design and approaches to respond to the local needs. And that's my third point. And last which I think my colleague now will take over and talk about it. But I think for us, the project which we were doing earlier in one state which was an inclusive sanitation in one of the states in India, we realized that it just a project does not excite us enough. How do you scale up? And that is what we as a guy scaling up happens when the peer-to-peer learning happens. When the new approaches, new technologies, new roles, new responsibilities that require a huge investment in the scaling of the practitioners at the ground level. And that only the capacity-building programs will not be able to do. So can we create a forum where people can start talking about each one of their problems and then that has a more dominant effect. A lot of cities can pick it up at the same time. So we are looking at a whole sanitation from three points. One is capacity issues. We are looking at research and action research on the ground. We are also looking at advocacy issues. And we try to bridge the gap between policy and projects. And we are working at three levels, center level, state level and city level. But while we are having this transition of urban transition is happening in India, the broad objective for us is how do you scale up the learning from India to rest of the world and learn from the rest of the world so that we can contextualize some of the good practices in India. But I'll talk about the urban forum. My colleague, Marine, will talk about it. Thank you. Let me have the next slide, please. As the context has been set by today, so just to give you an overview about with regard to the forum, the forum has been conceptualized, keeping in view the climate change and inclusivity angle into it. And we are targeting the Himalayan region, keeping in mind that it's the Himalayas are the youngest mountains and they're more prone with regard to climate change. The whole idea and the notion with regard to the forum was to bring the common voice at the center. That is why we have the three pillars, the knowledge sharing capacity building and advisory support. And the aim of the forum is to have a collaborative and responsive forum that provides a platform for cities to engage with each other with the state and the center and also to help in developing and implementing contextual policy technology governance so that everything is tailor-made, not one size fit for all. In this regard, there have been a lot of consultation meet because we really wanted to have a bottom-up approach. We had different consultation meetings with the different stakeholders, be it the decision makers, be it the grassroots NGOs, the donors, and this forum is timely when the UN SDG recognizes this decade as the decade for action. And in COP 27, the explicit reference to human rights for clean water and health and sustainable environment was being emphasized. So with this, I will end the whole background about the forum. Thank you. Well, yes, indeed. It is good to know that how India is moving a step forward towards city-wise inclusive sanitation by making a forum for inclusive and resilient water and sanitation in Delhi cities. And it is rightly mentioned at urban centers in sensitive ecosystem like Himalaya, certainly have to learn from each other and adopt inclusive and resilient planning. And it is indeed the era or the decade of action and implementation. Well, now talking about the urban sanitation, now I welcome Juliet Willits from Institute of Sustainable Futures, University of Technology, Sydney, to share with us a brief of their research on the impacts of climate change on urban sanitation in Indonesia. Professor Juliet leads applied research to inform policy and practice in water and sanitation in Asia and the Pacific. Her works covered diverse areas including technical, institutional, governance, as well as climate change, gender equality, and monitoring. Juliet's achievements have been recognized by multiple awards. She holds a PhD in environmental engineering and leads applied research in partnership with multilateral, UN, bilateral, and not-for-profit organizations and has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles. Well, Juliet, here we welcome you to give a brief insight about your topic. Great, thank you so much Nidhi and greetings everyone. Honored to be able to speak with you in this session and fantastic to hear the inputs that are very inspiring from India and elsewhere. So I'm going to start with a slightly more negative picture and then I'll turn around that to the positive. So we did a study in Indonesia across four cities that suffer from a range of different climate hazards including floods and droughts and also storms and strong winds, sea level rise. All climate hazards that we expect may increase in the years to come. And what we found from this study was many of the disruptions that this can cause to the existing sanitation systems. So we found places where water shortages were preventing households from being able to access their toilets and that could be multiple times even in a week or in a month. And in those situations, sometimes up to some 30% of people were then moving back to open defecation which is the last thing that we want to see. And that went up to as high as 70% in one of the locations in the study. We also saw evidence of fight and stress amongst respondents looking for places in order to meet their defecation needs and that was particularly for women. It was particularly for more vulnerable households. So we need to recognise that starting off with vulnerabilities then also leads to increased vulnerabilities under climate change impacts. We also saw that all stages of the sanitation chain were affected. Flooding caused contaminants to overflow in many locations or see water to intrude to unsealed systems. We saw that many places had inadequate emptying services during different kinds of intense rain events. So trucks weren't able to get to the different systems that were overflowing. There were sludge treatment plants that had to be closed down right at the time when they were really needed. And equally, when there was not enough water, we saw situations as colour described where sewers become blocked, you're not able to move around the waste. And in general, we saw great interactions between water supply systems, drainage systems and the sanitation systems. As Jay described, we need new ways to think about how these are integrated in positive ways rather than in negative ways where we create the sanitation crisis that he described by not addressing the way these systems interface with one another. So we went through a process to prioritise the risks with local governments and they came up with many different types of adaptation actions that they could take in their own cities. It included mapping at risk areas and populations. It included thinking about financing options. It included thinking about user awareness and engaging households since they are part of the sanitation chain about the things that they could do to protect public health. And the framework you now see on the slide here was developed, building from that Indonesia study and it's part of a broader landscape study. Came up with a four-part framework of some of the ingredients that we think are really important for having a climate-resilience sanitation system. And so it is part of the institution's policy and planning that really means understanding risks and vulnerabilities and including that in planning processes. For infrastructure and service provision, you've heard others speak about the need to have responsive and flexible approaches which might well mean the move towards decentralised systems where you can manage at smaller scale, smaller loops and less extensive impacts from climate hazards and finance and user engagement to other important areas of that framework. So I hope that gives some insight of both the positives of what we can do but also some of the risks that if we don't think about climate change, we're going to be caught unawares and need to invest and work a little differently in our sector and beyond. Thank you, Suditi. Thank you so much, Juliet, for sharing your brief and yes, indeed, it is a heartbreaking picture that we just saw from Indonesia and I am sure this is the picture that we see across the world. And yes, the adaptation action, the framework that you shared is indeed gives us the belief, the hope that yes, we are going in the right direction across the globe. And we will definitely get back to you with questions regarding the evidences from the ground gathered during the research. Well, now moving forward, talking about the impacts of sanitation on human settlements, public health is a key concern. Now I would like to welcome Surya Raj from Emory University to give us more details about the tool that they have developed to assess public health risks associated with sanitation. Surya Raj is an Associate Director of Research Project at the Center for Global Safe Water, Sanitation and Hygiene at Emory University as well as the Executive Director and co-founder of CENIPATH International. Surya has been managing research and dissemination activities related to the water sector for the past ten years. She has coordinated studies throughout sub-Saharan, African and South India, South countries. Well, now I invite Surya Raj for sharing her brief overview about the CENIPATH tool. Thank you so much, Surya. So our team developed the CENIPATH exposure assessment tool to help assess the relative public health risks of exposure to sanitation, poor sanitation. As seen on this slide, on the left side of the slide, the tool looks at multiple pathways of exposure to fecal contamination by assessing behaviors as well as environmental contamination levels. And this diagram shows the pathways of contamination. Which are reservoirs in the residential environment where contamination may end up due to poor management of feces. So this includes things like public latrines, raw produce, street food, open drains, flood water, surface water, drinking water and bathing water. So as we think about the impact of climate change on sanitation and public health, we like this diagram from the US EPA on the right side of the slide, which shows climate impacts, if you don't mind clicking, such as precipitation extremes, extreme weather events and rising sea levels can change the environmental exposures, including reducing food and water quality, changing infectious agents and displacing populations. The largest effects are often felt by marginalized people, as others have mentioned. And people are often those who contribute least to climate change. And climate change can change both the behavior of the population through access to safe food and water of the places they live, as well as the pathogen levels themselves in the environment. In the work we've done on Sandy Paths with partners across the world, if you don't mind going to the next slide, we've seen that exposure to contamination from adverse events, such as flooding, is dominant, meaning that it's one of the primary rounds of exposure for both adults and children in communities in several cities, including Kampala, Uganda, Simri, Cambodia, Dhaka, Bangladesh, Osaka, Zambia, and Accra, Ghana. So on the diagram, you see the purple arrows on top show where the flooding has been dominant for adults as an exposure pathway and on the bottom for children. As sea levels rise and weather extremes are more common with climate change, flooding is exacerbated and flooding can also affect other pathways of contamination, such as open drains, toilets, and latrines, and facilitate further spread of harmful pathogens throughout the residential environment. Another way that climate change could have impact health is through things like drought. So when you have a water scarce area as a result of climate change, which has severe public health impact, drought can lead to the use of polluted and contaminated water sources that may lead to outbreaks of disease, such as cholera, as we've seen in some of our work in Kenya, Sanipa. So what we really need are adaptive and resilient sanitation and public health approaches and to be actively monitoring these risks to mitigate the effects of climate change and achieve inclusive sanitation goals. Thank you. Well, this definitely, actually this Sanipa tool definitely looks promising and gives us the holistic approach to the risks mitigation and especially it gives us the hope for giving us a context in the context of sanitation in face of climate extremities. So thank you so much, Soja Raj, for giving us the glimpse of your tool. Well, now moving forward, we know that utilities are the critical pieces to the puzzle of implementing and maintaining resilient and inclusive sanitation on ground. Let us now hear from two utilities in emerging economies, Brazil and Philippines. So first, I would like to invite Jennifer Chan from Manila Water to understand the work undertaken by Manila Water to provide water and sanitation services on ground and how they are embracing the decarbonisation journey. Jennifer Chan is a licensed chemical engineer and presently the planning head of wastewater operations group of Manila Water, East Zone. Jennifer leads the formulation and implementation of tactical plans to ensure efficient and effective operations and maintenance and provides technical lead for new business opportunities in terms of wastewater system. She was a recipient of GICF Foreign Scholarship and Training Program for wastewater and drainage management at Japan in 2016. Thank you so much Manila. Jennifer, you can now share about your experiences. Yes, good day everyone. I'm glad to share to you the Manila Water's Climate Change Mitigation Adaptation Strategies. Next slide please. Our company has 25 years of extensive experience in the Philippine water sector from water, treatment and distribution to wastewater management. We serve over 7.3 million locally and have water utility operations in various countries such as Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia. Aside from providing clean drinking water, we also provide sewage and sanitation services to help improve the conditions of the waterways and safeguard our public health. Our mandate is to ensure that domestic wastewater from households are properly collected and treated and does not contribute to the pollution of rivers and other water bodies. We were able to build 41 STPs with 410 MLB capacity as compared to 140 MLB STP that we inherited in 1997. Aligned with global initiatives on climate change, our organization has embedded ESG initiatives into our corporate strategies. Manila Water's adaptation strategies essentially revolve around three areas, water security as a resilience and emergency preparedness and response. Aside from the watershed protection which we mean to be an integral part of our goal to develop, rehabilitate and enhance water resources, the company is also building climate resilient infrastructures sufficient to satisfy for our service improvements. We are also strategizing our CAPEX rehabilitating our facilities to prevent reduced town time during calamities. An example is the 10 MLB Olandes STP which is designed to stand on stilts and can withstand flooding in its location near a river. Manila Water also developed a business continuity framework a tactical plan to achieve a recovery of our critical services with minimal interruptions ensuring instability for our customers and stakeholders. We then focus our mitigation plans under three items. One, managing emission levels resource recovery measures and adapting energy efficient practices and technologies. We are seizing opportunities to make positive environmental contributions and currently identifying sources of greenhouse gases in our operations. Implementation of the carbonization roadmap towards NED-0 targets is part of our long-term sustainability goal. So as of date we are exploring ways to repurpose our by-products such as wastewater, the water's large turn into compost by solids or soil conditioner, effluent reuse and capturing methane for potential waste to energy. By 2025 the company's ESG target is 60% reduction and avoidance of scope one and scope two emissions. So we are looking to expand our wastewater services and in this treatment capacity to 500 MLD by adding three more STPs in 2025 and to realize our target of 100% sewer and sanitation services in Manila area within our franchise period. Manila water also intends to contribute to low carbon economy. Our efforts for the past years resulted to 4% reduction in GHG emissions compared to our 2020 data. With the reduction largely driven by energy efficient programs and the company's transition to renewable energy. We also started exploration of large scale installation of solar powers and building mini hydro plants. Lastly, Manila water signifies its commitment to improve social outcomes in the communities we serve advocating green supply chain practices and continuing increase in support to our operations with renewable energy. And with that thank you very much and have a great week ahead. Thank you so much Jennifer for sharing what Manila water is doing and showing commitments towards ESG commitments to 2025. Now let us hear from Brazil as we have another panelist with us Pericles Operates. Pericles from Aigua Sentimental Brazil to share the work they undertake in Rio de Janeiro. Pericles Weber has over 30 years of experience in the sanitation sector and is currently the director of operations at Aigua Sentimental where he is responsible for the operation of the 18 companies of the Aigua Group. Pericles also manages areas of engineering, customer management, technological innovation environment and climate change within the utility. Over to you Pericles. Thank you very much. Good morning good afternoon and good night. Thank you for having me today. Today I'll talk a little bit about our new contract in Rio de Janeiro. First of all I'd like to present brief information about Aigua we are one of the major private water companies in Brazil running 21 operations throughout Brazil and serving more than 7 million people. One of our newest contract is Rio de Janeiro. The water and sewage services in Rio de Janeiro is divided in blocks and Aigua is responsible for one of them a very special one that you can see on the map. Here we have the Barra da Tijuca area which comprises Jacarepaguá also beautiful beaches, Alagum complex and many communities as Cidade de Deus City of God famous for the movie and we also have Rio das Pedras as an example of communities. These communities are extremely social vulnerability and they lack of sanitation and rain drainage and salt waste collection so with that all these things are discharging to the rivers that go to the lagoon and consequently to the beach compromising the environment of the region. Next slide, please. Well, the result of all of this as we have this lagoon complex very polluted with algae presence, sewage, a lot of salt waste like mattress, sofas and the contamination of the beach. So this area we have around 1 million people living here and the challenge is to provide the services in order to improve the quality of life of these people as well as to recover the environmental conditions. So what Iguá is committed to do in order to recover the environmental there as you can see on the picture on the left side upper left side we see the lagoon complex and the first thing that we're going to do is to drainage to the dredging the sediment present on the complex lagoon in order to recreate the natural exchange between the ocean and the lagoon system and with that to allow more species of birds and animals to growth and to recover at the same time we must stop that sewage and the salt waste goes into the lagoon. So we are going as you can see on the right side the picture the map there was a color areas we are going to provide combined sewage system in order to remove the sewage that goes into the lagoon and pump all of the sewage to the barra sewage works as you can see in the middle of the picture and in order to do that we are expanding the treatment capacity and its efficiency and to provide a better quality with all of that we believe that we can recover the complex lagoon and to allow that a more balanced environment at the same time we are adopting a more low-carbon approach in order to do that regarding engineering process materials the way that we manage the company and we start already developing some projects that has helped to cope with these challenges as you can see we start already to remove solid waste and privation new deposit of waste in one year that we are in charge of the operation we remove more than 30 tons of waste from the lagoon complex and we also started to recover the mangrove of the lagoon area we are implementing a seed nursery with more than 40,000 seedlings in order to not only to recover the mangrove itself but also to capture CO2 of the process so with all these actions we believe we are able to provide a much better sanitation services to the population to recover the environment and to improve the quality of life of these people this is the what I have to present and available for questions later on thank you well thank you so much for sharing your insights about Brazil and how your research is undergoing and taking multiple actions towards pursuing climate resilience cities well now after the short pitches from our panellists we will now move forward to the question and answer from our panellists and here I would like to now invite my co-moderator Virginia from GrandForce to take over Dr. Virginia Newton Lewis is an expert in water science governance and policy and has been working as water sustainability director in GrandForce since January 2023 prior to her engagement at GrandForce she worked with water rate and UN's food and agriculture organization Dr. Newton has recently been working with the British standard institution and the international organization for standardization ISO on standards for net zero and water over to you Virginia thank you very much and thank you very much for having me here so the next section of this session is going to be about 20 minutes where we get to ask the participants and panellists questions so my first question is to Anna can you hear me Anna we've heard from your presentation that sanitation is often forgotten in the climate discourse and we'd like to change this so what is your view about how we could do this and make the links between sanitation and climate change more visible you might have heard the slogan that one dollar invested in sanitation comes back with as five dollars so that was a concerted moderated actions prior to the international year where we came together to identify what is the one voice we can speak with what's the one message that we want to bring across we can have different ideas about many things but there are important things where we have the same opinion and I think a similar effort is needed regarding the link between climate and sanitation climate can be an enabler and I think the study that Julia has led the landscape study is an excellent background we've tried in COP 27 and others to bring stakeholders together so Zana was moderating that message on the international year and together with IWA I think we need a similar effort to speak with one voice and to be heard beyond the sector to make clear that sanitation is understood as an enabler of climate action and sustainable development and I think that could help us to be better understood beyond our sector Thank you so much for that insight and a great call to action to be speaking with one voice Jay, my next question is to you could you elaborate a little bit on the concept of sanitation sensitive design and how that's been implemented in practice in cities perhaps you could give us a quick overview of the main challenges you faced in the implementation of this approach So the concept of sanitation sensitive design emerged on the back of a challenge we took about 10 years ago on visioning a non-suit sanitation future and of course it started with the premise of trying to close the gap for sanitation for the poor but on the way it started to resonate as the solution for climate challenges as well Now we are at the kind of pivotal point that we've come to a stage where we have all these technologies but the challenge is that we have a lock-in we have a lock-in by our global banks that they don't know how to finance appliances in the business of infrastructure so they haven't come yet to the party to say that we can finance all these new innovations etc Similarly municipalities also employ pipeline and waste water specialists so therefore then to transition to understand how to design a non-suit partway is also challenging so you know you have to and the sanitation-sensitive design you know way transition municipalities from being infrastructure specialists to being opening up the market to the enterprises and the products to take over the service value chain etc and the circular economy part but there's various, I mean we also have ideologies that keep getting pushed around like a religion that you know creates a lock-in that doesn't give the kind of acceleration to this paradigm to move much faster you know in this area and you know I can go on and share many of these things I mean electric cars is a good example around how governments have you know grown an industry on the back of climate this thing I mean we don't need electric cars really there's other options as well you know the same way we're not seeing those kind of things happening for sanitation and you know there's still this kind of pursuance in government strategies to build bigger wastewater treatment plants bigger sewers etc etc and the developing world just can't afford that and they locked into this paradigm so until we change this paradigm at all layers you know we're going to and it's a challenge and a battle at the moment so just a little bit of marketing I am the chair of the IWA specialist group on non-suit sanitation and in our history we're holding the first non-suit sanitation conference in Johannesburg in October this year and I'd encourage people to attend because this is where we talk in much more detail and the progress we have thank you for the plug for your conference is noted in October you were very clear there about the challenges of being locked into a paradigm and that can have an expression in terms of financing it can have an expression in terms of ideology and an expression in terms of you know like some of the painful changes needed in the transition thank you for that Jay okay the next question is to Hitesh and it's about the forum so perhaps also Maureen you might want to hear but we'd like to understand a little bit more about your experiences with the forum and what you see are the main challenges for hilly regions that have come out of the discussions in the forum so please Hitesh over to you hi I will be responding to this because he had to rush for a meeting so like as I mentioned that we had a couple of discussions with baby stakeholders in order to understand the nuances of coming up with the health forum so basically what we gathered was that even though there is a lot of work locally being done but that is not being disseminated or being voiced out and also one of the critical thing is that data, data is integral to how to create an informed decision so how do we get an accurate data second regulations and regulations need to be enabled through policy and legislation another important key thing which we learned over the progress was a private sector is in and how we accommodate them into the built environment where the government is the primary stakeholder clarity of mandate so that also keeping in view that in Indian context and I'm sure the global in many of the global countries the work should not be in silos multi sectorial approach and fostering key partnership is a key for any project or forum to come up what we also learned was social inclusion apart from infrastructure solution keeping in view the marginalised and the gender that is women to make it more inclusive in nature with when we are doing the initial research in the Himalayan region covering the 11 states and the one union territory we found that the provision in the national missions and program lacks the local context and how do we build that that is one of the integral part which we really have to look into and a dialogue on collaborative actions to strengthen capacity building and further increment mental solutions is the need of the year I will stop thank you so much for your very comprehensive answer with so many details I'm going to pick out here social inclusion importance of the local context and this need for collaborative action is the really key ones on top of the issues around data and dissemination and the regulators so Maureen thank you for that insight moving to Juliet we heard from your research in Indonesia but I was wondering if you could give a more global perspective comparing experiences in different countries about what the variations are in the ways that different countries and organisations are working on the urban sanitation and climate change issues so Juliet over to you thanks Virginia and yes I'd love to answer so from a global perspective the landscape study that Arne mentioned and I'll put the link in somewhere amongst the question and answers for that report that drew together the views of people from more than 25 countries including city governments, national governments private sector actors, NGOs, development banks etc and that group came up with I guess the breadth of strategies they need to be using and lots of examples of leading practice which I think can help show us a direction along with the many great examples from this session and so ideas were such as in Nepal where sanitation has become part of the nationally determined contributions it's part of the national adaptation plan so it's firmly making inroads into that climate policy space in Bangladesh making efforts to bring together institutional arrangements that support how disaster response and sanitation and climate are brought together in Zambia and other countries like PG where they're using risk and vulnerability informed planning processes such as I described there were planned for Indonesia there are many many different possibilities and ways forward that are described in that study and I think for those who are ploundering and feeling a bit overwhelmed at the I guess the enormity of the climate change challenge in order to not be paralyzed it's great to see these I guess positive deviance cases if you like that others can follow and take inspiration from I'd encourage people to look out for those examples and also become one of them yourselves thanks Virginia thank you so much Juliet so please do have a look everybody at that link in the chat and I like this expression positive deviances so if you need some inspiration please check out Juliet's report Serja moving to you could you elaborate a little bit more with an example and please present some more evidence from your work about how climate change impacts pathways of exposure due to fecal contamination sure thank you so much Virginia so I'll give an example from Uganda as I mentioned many of these pathways are influenced by changes in weather I mentioned flooding can affect overflow of the trains toilets but also of course move through the community open trains but also food safety you know you can think about hygiene and markets and or with street vendors in Uganda the sand path assessment was actually conducted in Kampala and was done in parallel actually with another tool the high crystal which evaluates how flooding and drainage infrastructure influence the presence of human excreta and environment and also factors in associated climate risk and we saw how the sand path tool identified dominant fecal exposure pathways as open drains flood water produce and street food in these and this align actually with the hot spots predicted by the high crystal tool we saw that overlap in health hazards another thing from Uganda that was interesting and is relevant to discussion is how seasonality changes with climate change potentially and construct hazards or disease so generally we recommend that sanding path assessments are conducted during the rainy seasons or wet seasons that often correlates with the highest level of diarrheal disease but in Uganda we also had colleagues who repeated the assessment during the dry season as well so while we saw that some pathways remain dominant throughout seasons others were only there for rainy seasons for example flooding and others may remain dominant but those behaviors and the environmental contaminations significantly change and so as changing weather patterns that can also affect the seasonality of these risks. Thanks. Thank you so much for that. It was great to hear about the example from Uganda and to really flag this issue of seasonality which can change the expression of some of the relationships between sanitation and climate change so thank you so much for that. Moving now to Jennifer Jennifer could you tell us a bit about how Manila Philippines is making its wastewater facilities more resilient to climate change and also enabling them to contribute to mitigation. Jennifer over to you. Manila Philippines is experiencing calamities on a yearly basis which puts Manila water facilities at risk as it is most flood prone areas. We have strategized our capital expenditure plans by way of reducing or reducing downtime during extreme wet weather events. Just like my example STP a while ago the Olendes STP flood resiliency project we designed it to stand on a field so that it can withstand frequent flooding in the area. In a nutshell part of our climate change mitigation plan is to reduce our GHG emissions at collection and treatment of wastewater utilization of renewable energy on our operations. The company is currently identifying ways for bi-product repurposing and further exploration to solar power, mini hydro plant and methane capturing for waste to energy projects. That's it Virginia, thank you. Thank you so much Jennifer. Unfortunately we've lost the connection to Pericles for the final question of this session so I'm just going to wrap up with a little bit of a perspective from the private sector as well. We've heard so many insights from the panellists around the progress and challenges they see at the intersection of climate change and sanitation from a resilience adaptation and mitigation perspective. These themes really also resonate with the private sector. We see this to be a complex problem and that tackling it is going to lead to partnerships and for private sector actors to contribute in several different ways whether that be through the platforms and forums that we've heard about in this discussion through innovation but really it comes down to a focus on the delivery of solutions. So thank you to my panellists here for your answers to your questions and we're going to move on to the next section of this discussion. Thank you so much. Well thank you Virginia and the panel for your question and answer session. Let's move forward to our audience who have joined us across the group. They have raised question in the Q&A box and now for this part of the session I would like to invite our reputiers for this session. They are the IWA Grandfors YWP Young Water Professional Fellows Yang and Chelsea. So I invite you both to facilitate this session. Yang is one of the IWA Grandfors Youth Action for SDG6 fellow consultant to the Asian Development Bank in charge of coordinating and managing the Asia and the Pacific Water Resilience Hub. Yang currently serves in various IWA bodies such as the Emerging Water Leaders Sharing Committee, the Managing Committee of the Intermittent Water Supply Specialist Group and the Boat Committee on Governance and Nominations. He was one of the finalists of the 2020 IWA Young Leadership Award and Chelsea Howard is a senior process engineer Jacob's water and wastewater infrastructure team in Sydney, Australia with varied project experience addressing current and emerging water challenges. She was recently awarded the Australian Water Association NSW Young Water Professional of the Year for 2023. Chelsea is an active IWA member and serves on the IWA Young Water Professional Steering Committee and IWA Australia Committee and is also our IWA Grandfors Youth Action S6 Fellow. So over to you Yang and Chelsea for this session. Thank you very much for the introduction and yeah thank you very much to our panelists for some really interesting insights. So now we are going to gather some of the questions from our audience for our panelists to answer so we're going to kick off with a question that comes from Claire Pangelli and the question is how do you successfully pitch urban sanitation projects within a climate finance paradigm? Is it stronger to promote the mitigation or adaptation benefits? And I might direct this firstly to Ani. Can you just repeat the question? Yes, I will go again. So how do you successfully pitch urban sanitation projects within a climate finance paradigm? Is it stronger to promote the mitigation benefits? The very big topic is the adaptation part because I think sanitation is really very much in the center of adaptation and it's leading to a number of what we've seen from Juliet and others of disasters. Personally I think that for example that there will be a shortage on organic matter and there will be a very strong need to have negative emission technologies and pyrolysis can produce biochar as well from fecal sludge. So this is an example for a very innovative approach which could as well sort of change the perception of how sanitation systems are seen and there can as well be sort of parameters how to manage such services. So there's not an easy answer but I think that's something that we have to work on together. Thank you Arne. I understand there's not enough time so I might just pick out a question from Valentina and I might ask Juliet to answer this one. What do you think is the role of international law and policy in accelerating water security and sanitation? And are there examples of successful or perhaps vice versa? That's a pretty big question. I'm someone who works primarily in the global south and I'll stay focused to that. I would say the human right to water and sanitation is the central international legal instrument that we can and should all be using to help make our case and it seems amazing that it's been a human right for so many years and yet there's still so much more effort needed to put it into action and I think often it's been set up as a sort of adversarial thing of citizens versus governments rather than thinking about how the human right can be used to help enable local governments who are often the duty bearers enable them to take on them and take on their responsibility, advocate up the chain for the budgets that they need to look after something like sanitation which is a public service and we've seen that approach work in Nepal and Bhutan so I think it can be done but we need to shift the way perhaps we're working on from a right spaces. I hope that's at least some way to answer a very big question. I was just sort of distracted if I may add that the $1, $5 the key publications were by Guy Hudson and they were very much sort of geared towards lost lives and I think we could revisit those publications and try to embark on them with a link to climate change because I think they were really powerful and well received in this sector. Sorry for that. I was just searching for these and so that's why I wanted to add that sentence. Thank you. Thank you Juliette and Arnie. Unfortunately that's all the time we have for additional questions so we might throw it back to Siddipti for closing but noting that other questions on the from the participants will be answered through a Q&A post webinar. Thank you. Well yes indeed this was a very very insightful session and I'm sure the learnings from all of the experts will go definitely a long way towards achieving the STG6 agenda. The shift in paradigm to city-wise inclusive sanitation will require a shift in mindsets and with this inclusive approach I believe everybody will benefit from adequate sanitation service delivery outcome that meets user aspirations and that protects the health of the users. Not only this human waste is safely managed along the whole sanitation service chain ensuring protection of the environment and protection of human health. A diversity of appropriate technical solutions is embraced comprising of on-site sanitation in either centralized or decentralized system. These elements align to a new norm of inclusive sanitation approach which incorporates a paradigm aligned to decentralization, non-civil technologies, nature-based solutions and behavior change and I'm happy to say that IWA already is promoting a comprehensive and integrated approach to managing water one that envies resilient and water-wise cities. To help progress its work on inclusive sanitation IWA will leverage and build on the foundation and engagement secured in other recent global initiatives particularly the IWA principles for water-wise cities, IWA Climate Smart Utility Initiative and work on regulating for city-wise inclusive sanitation. So yes, now is the time to thank all the organizers IWA and special mention to the partners GIZ Grenfers and Susanna for this amazing, amazing, wonderful session. My heartfelt gratitude to all the panelists for sharing your experiences with us which is indeed a very, very helpful for us to learn and develop. I would also like to thank the lovely audience here for being with us, especially the inquisitiveness that they showed in the Q&A session and lastly special mention to my co-moderators Virginia and IWA fellows, Jan and Chelsea for being our repertoires for this session. So thank you very, very much everyone for your precious time for this amazing session. Thank you.