Around 90 per cent of climate disasters are water-related, with many of the world’s largest cities at risk in unpredictable ways.

The frequency and magnitude of events such as floods and droughts are evolving due to climatic trends. When water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) services and systems cannot cope with intensifying and unpredictable climatic extremes the results can be devastating.

New research from WaterAid examines climatic trends over the past 42 years in the world’s 100 most-populated cities, plus 12 cities. It analyses whether these cities are becoming more prone to floods, or to droughts, and how these changes affect the people who live there.

Many cities experience ‘whiplash’; droughts that dry up water sources followed closely by floods that overwhelm infrastructure, destroying sanitation systems and contaminating drinking water.

As two thirds of the global population are projected to live in cities by 2050, and climate hazards become more intense and erratic, there is an urgent need for decision makers to understand the threats to infrastructure and society, and to do much more to achieve and maintain universal and equitable access to WASH in cities.

WaterAid is calling for a raft of measures, including greater global leadership to accelerate action on water, for a greater focus on finance to alleviate the issues and for governments to deliver water plans integrated into national and city-level climate adaptation plans.

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