SDG 6 cannot be achieved through access alone; climate stress is exposing systemic fragilities in WASH systems, necessitating a shift towards resilience, equity, and gender-responsive water governance
On World Water Day 2026, the global theme “Water and Gender” arrives at a critical moment. The theme seeks to accelerate progress towards Sustainable Development Goal 6 (SDG 6): ensuring access to water and sanitation for all by 2030. Yet, as the SDG Report 2024 underscores, progress remains dangerously off track, with several indicators showing a slowdown.
At the centre of this challenge are water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) systems—the infrastructure, services, and institutions that deliver safe drinking water, sanitation, and basic hygiene across households, schools, and health facilities. Climate change, however, is increasingly altering the availability, quality, and predictability of water resources, exposing structural weaknesses within these systems. The challenge is therefore shifting from expanding access to ensuring reliability under stress.
These pressures can be understood through a simple relationship: risk = hazard × vulnerability. Climate change is intensifying hazards through more frequent droughts, floods, and contamination, while vulnerability is shaped by underlying social and economic inequalities, including gender.
Climate change, however, is increasingly altering the availability, quality, and predictability of water resources, exposing structural weaknesses within these systems.
Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) is useful here not as a fully operational model, but as a guiding framework for water governance rooted in the Dublin Principles. Despite critiques of being overly complex and difficult to implement, it helps situate WASH within the wider system that sustains it by linking water sources, allocation, institutions, participation, and equity. Viewed through this lens, WASH is not only about service access but also about water governance under climate stress and its ability to sustain reliable and equitable services amid growing climate risk.
While WASH systems remain central to development agendas, access remains deeply uneven across much of the Global South. Recent global estimates illustrate the scale of the gap. As of 2024, about 2.2 billion people still lack safely managed drinking water, while 3.4 billion lack safely managed sanitation, and 1.7 billion lack basic hygiene facilities at home. Disparities become even clearer along the sanitation chain: in Sub-Saharan Africa, only about 26 percent of the population has access to safely managed sanitation, and roughly 354 million people globally still practise open defecation. A similar challenge appears in hygiene access, where the number of people lacking basic hygiene services increased from 427 million in 2015 to 502 million in 2024, underscoring that expanding coverage alone does not guarantee reliable WASH systems. These trends suggest that infrastructure expansion alone has not translated into universal or sustained access. More importantly, they show that measuring progress through coverage alone obscures whether WASH systems actually function under stress.
The limits of an access-based approach become more visible under conditions of climate stress. WASH systems are highly dependent on the stability of water resources, which are now under increasing pressure. Groundwater supplies around half of global domestic water use, yet nearly 70 percent of the world’s major aquifers are in long-term decline. Similarly, surface water sources are also becoming less reliable, reflected in the fact that since 1970, the world has lost more than 30 percent of its glacier mass, weakening river systems that provide drinking water to hundreds of millions of people. Looking ahead, the scale of the challenge is expected to intensify, with the number of urban residents facing water scarcity projected to more than double by 2050.
As of 2024, about 2.2 billion people still lack safely managed drinking water, while 3.4 billion lack safely managed sanitation, and 1.7 billion lack basic hygiene facilities at home.
These pressures are already transforming the nature of the WASH challenge. Climate change is influencing the behaviour, timing, and geographic spread of many pathogens linked to waterborne diseases, while also intensifying extreme events such as floods and droughts. These shocks disrupt drinking water supply, damage sanitation infrastructure, overwhelm drainage and wastewater systems, and increase demand for hygiene services during crises. This creates a dual pressure on WASH systems: supply becomes less reliable just as demand becomes more acute. Therefore, the challenge is not only access but also resilience in the face of such shocks.
The impacts of these system stresses are not evenly distributed. As outlined earlier, risk is a function of hazard and vulnerability. While climate change intensifies the hazard, vulnerability determines how that risk is experienced in practice. Gender is a central component of this vulnerability within WASH systems. It shapes both the division of labour and access to resources, which in turn influences how households respond when water systems become unreliable.
One of the most visible manifestations of this is the burden of securing water. An estimated 1.8 billion people live in households without water on their premises, with women and girls responsible for water collection in 7 out of 10 cases. As water sources become less predictable, the time and physical effort required to secure water increase, with direct implications for education, mobility, and economic participation.
One of the most visible manifestations of this is the burden of securing water. An estimated 1.8 billion people live in households without water on their premises, with women and girls responsible for water collection in 7 out of 10 cases.
These pressures extend beyond labour into health and well-being. For instance, in climate-sensitive regions such as the Himalayas, including Ladakh, changing water availability is increasing both the distance to water sources and reliance on unsafe supplies, raising exposure to urinary tract infections. More broadly, inadequate water, sanitation, and hygiene services constrain menstrual hygiene management (MHM), maternal care, infection prevention, and the safe use of schools and health facilities. These impacts are most severe for women and adolescent girls in poorer households, particularly those living with disabilities, where limited and distant access further restricts participation in education, work, and public life.
India offers an important lens for the wider Global South. Over the past decade, programmes such as the Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM) have significantly expanded access. Rural tap water coverage has increased from about 17 percent in 2019 to over 82 percent. With JJM 2.0 now underway, policy attention is shifting towards service delivery and long-term system sustainability. Read through an IWRM lens, the challenge is not simply to expand infrastructure but to align water sources, service delivery, institutions, data systems, and local participation so that WASH systems can function under conditions of climate stress.
The first priority is to strengthen how WASH systems are measured. Progress has long been tracked through coverage indicators such as the number of taps installed or toilets built. While important, these measures do not capture whether services are reliable or sustained. Governments need to complement access to data with indicators that track system performance under stress, including continuity of supply, seasonal source failure, water quality compliance, treatment uptime, and recovery after extreme events. This aligns with the IWRM emphasis on monitoring and adaptive management.
A second shift is to place climate-resilient service delivery at the centre of WASH planning. This reflects the Dublin Principle that freshwater is finite and vulnerable and reinforces the need to manage water supply, sanitation, drainage, and wastewater as interdependent components of a single system. Designing from source to service requires protecting aquifers and watersheds, diversifying water sources, and ensuring that sanitation and wastewater systems can function under conditions of flood, drought, and contamination.
A third priority is to address vulnerability within WASH systems more directly. Incorporating sex-disaggregated data into monitoring frameworks can help identify unequal burdens and inform more targeted interventions. Strengthening women’s participation in local water governance can also improve system responsiveness, reinforcing the Dublin Principle that recognises the central role of women in water management.
Through an IWRM lens, system performance depends on how well WASH policies incorporate sustainability principles that integrate social, ecological, and infrastructural systems.
Technology and local knowledge must work in tandem. Communities in water-scarce regions often hold detailed knowledge of local sources, recharge patterns, and seasonal flows. Integrating this knowledge with tools such as groundwater monitoring, sensor-based alerts, and early warning systems can strengthen preparedness and improve source management. This further aligns with a core principle of IWRM, enabling solutions that are participatory, equitable, and sustainable.
Finally, resilience planning must extend beyond households to public institutions. An integrated approach also requires that schools, anganwadis, and health facilities be treated as core service nodes within water governance, not as downstream beneficiaries of household access alone. Climate-sensitive design standards and service continuity benchmarks for these institutions are essential, particularly given their role in supporting girls’ education, MHM and maternal care.
The WASH challenge has indeed shifted. Through an IWRM lens, system performance depends on how well WASH policies incorporate sustainability principles that integrate social, ecological, and infrastructural systems. The task, therefore, is not just to extend access but to build systems that remain reliable, inclusive, and adaptive as risks intensify. Gender becomes central to this effort, as it shapes how water insecurity is experienced, who bears the burden of system failure, and whose knowledge is recognised in governance. If SDG 6 is to remain meaningful in a warming world, it must move beyond access and centre resilience, equity, and climate risk.
Sharon Sarah Thawaney is the Executive Assistant to the Vice President (Development Studies), Nilanjan Ghosh, at the Observer Research Foundation.
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Sharon Sarah Thawaney is the Executive Assistant to the Director - ORF Kolkata and CNED, Dr. Nilanjan Ghosh. She holds a Master of Social Work ...
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