The impact of global phosphorus scarcity on food security has increasingly been the focus of scientific studies over the past decade. However, systematic analyses of alternative futures for phosphorus supply and demand throughout the food system are still rare and provide limited inclusion of key stakeholders. Addressing global phosphorus scarcity requires an integrated approach exploring potential demand reduction as well as recycling opportunities. This implies recovering phosphorus from multiple sources, such as food waste, manure, and excreta, as well as exploring novel opportunities to reduce the long-term demand for phosphorus in food production such as changing diets. Presently, there is a lack of stakeholder and scientific consensus around priority measures. To therefore enable exploration of multiple pathways and facilitate a stakeholder dialog on the technical, behavioral, and institutional changes required to meet long-term future phosphorus demand, this paper introduces an interactive web-based tool, designed for visualizing global phosphorus scenarios in real time. The interactive global phosphorus scenario tool builds on several demand and supply side measures that can be selected and manipulated interactively by the user. It provides a platform to facilitate stakeholder dialog to plan for a soft landing and identify a suite of concrete priority options, such as investing in agricultural phosphorus use efficiency, or renewable fertilizers derived from phosphorus recovered from wastewater and food waste, to determine how phosphorus demand to meet future food security could be attained on a global scale in 2040 and 2070. This paper presents four example scenarios, including (1) the potential of full recovery of human excreta, (2) the challenge of a potential increase in non-food phosphorus demand, (3) the potential of decreased animal product consumption, and (4) the potential decrease in phosphorus demand from increased efficiency and yield gains in crop and livestock systems.

Health, sanitation, and livelihoods are interrelated human rights and essential components of community wellbeing. Despite the United Nations recognizing the human right to sanitation, one-third of the world's population lack access to improved sanitation. Furthermore, in many low- and middle-income countries, urban latrines are excavated manually without physical or regulatory protections. Container-based sanitation (CBS) has promise as a component of Citywide Inclusive Sanitation (CWIS) in densely populated, low-resource environments. Before investing in CBS, however, governments and funders require evidence of user acceptance, public demand, and labor aspects of service delivery. To provide this evidence base, we completed 633 interviews with active and former users of EkoLakay, a CBS service in Cap Haïtien, Haiti, creating a profile of the user base and their motivations for subscribing. We also compiled and analyzed secondary data to determine the impacts of widespread CBS expansion in northern Haiti. Results reveal that CBS presently serves a geographical subset of Haiti's most resource-insecure residents, and that CBS significantly reduces handling of untreated excreta in Haiti's Nord Department, while doubling livelihood opportunities through safe and dignified jobs. Given its cost-effectiveness, this provides an opportunity to achieve widespread sanitation coverage by integrating and cross-subsidizing CBS within a CWIS strategy.

Haiti is far from achieving the UN goal of sanitation access for all; 20% of the population has no sanitation access, and less than 0.1% of the country’s excreta is safely managed. Container-Based Sanitation (CBS) may be key to achieving timely and equitable sanitation coverage in Haiti’s cities. CBS can provide immediate sanitation access without preexisting infrastructure, and where permanent infrastructure is impractical. Investor caution and policy barriers, however, presently limit the growth of CBS solutions. Globally, most CBS services are provided by private organizations like EkoLakay, which provides a portable toilet and weekly excreta collection for a monthly fee. While the EkoLakay service is popular, attrition is high. This study examines the relationship between users and the service, and its role in improved sanitation accessibility. For this study, 633 active and former EkoLakay subscribers in Cap Haïtien were interviewed to reveal causes and implications of attrition. Households with active EkoLakay subscriptions are more likely than former subscribers to live in unauthorized informal residences and to lack energy or water infrastructure. A quarter of users unsubscribe voluntarily, after investing in permanent sanitation infrastructure. Over 30% of former users, however, reported unsubscribing due to economic challenges. Many involuntary terminations resulted in households losing access to private improved sanitation or reverting to open defecation, reducing progress toward global sustainability goals. Insights obtained contextualize the relationship between users and CBS services to inform public strategies for mitigating barriers to achieving universal safe sanitation.

A primary goal of the WASH sector is to facilitate transitions from open defecation to improved sanitation. Many residents of low-income countries desire improved sanitation but lack the resources to obtain or maintain access to toilets. For such persons, describing the goal as ‘behavior change’ implies a deficiency in mindset, failing to capture contextual factors affecting sanitation access. Furthermore, household circumstances affect movement both up and down the sanitation ladder, a phenomenon that the sector tends to overlook. This study, based on interviews with 308 former subscribers to Haitian container-based-sanitation service EkoLakay, tracks household sanitation access at four points in time: prior to subscribing, during the subscription period, immediately upon unsubscribing, and at the time of interview. We describe this movement through time as the ‘sanitation arc’. Prior to subscribing, households were more likely to practice open defecation or rely on non-household sanitation, and less likely to have private improved sanitation than the average urban Haitian. This distribution is reversed among former subscribers. Nearly half of former subscribers, however, could not afford continuous access to EkoLakay; 80% of involuntary terminations resulted in loss of access to private improved sanitation, and over one-third of these households reverted to open defecation.