Water, sanitation and hygiene sector resilience to climate change: the Badolo WashResilience Scientific Framework

Abstract

The water, sanitation and hygiene (Wash) sector is, in several regions of the world, one of the sectors still marked by knowledge, solutions, innovations and decision support tools deficits for relevant and efficient climate resilience policies. These deficits mainly concern climate change impacts on wash sector, wash sector vulnerability to climate change factors, wash sector resilience to climate change solutions and wash sector resilience to climate change schemes.In this article, we propose the Badolo WashResilience scientific framework, a tool for climate changeintegration into wash sector development policies. Its main element is the climate risk integration functionthat implements a sequential integration of climate risks into Wash sector policies. Each integration sequence achieves a specific resilience objective. Specific corpuses of climate change impacts, climate change vulnerability factors and climate change resilience solutions are the independent variables of this function. Its main dependent variables are climate change residuals impacts, climate change residual vulnerability factors and resilience configurations.For the Wash sector, the Badolo WashResilience scientific framework is an innovative tool for a significant improvement of climate risk integration processes and practices. It is a tool to identify and achieve required resilience progress, based on contextual capacities and specificities