Humanitarian Crisis Drivers of the Future - Urban Catastrophes: The Wat/San Dimension

This paper is about the future of water and sanitation stress (Wat/San) in urban slums and how such stress is likely to exacerbate other humanitarian crises over time. It is intended to explore the interlinkages between different crisis variables from a futures perspective, i.e., how current trends may evolve to producing surprising new outcomes. The paper begins in Section 1 with a summary of current water and sanitation issues in urban slums. It then proceeds to map the relationship between Wat/San stress and other causal factors in Section 2, including conflict, political violence, corruption, an epidemic disease. Section 3 extrapolates these relationships into the future using two case studies to explore scenarios of complex humanitarian crisis driven by Wat/San stress. It then concludes with a discussion of the implications of such future conditions for the present day humanitarian sector, ending in Section 4 with a series of recommendations for anticipating and responding to future Wat/San challenges in the present day.