Climate shock-related water insecurity has a significant impact on poverty, and vice versa, with poor people adversely impacted by different hazards. Many studies have focused on rural communities resulting in a lack of evidence on the vulnerability of urban dwellers. In this review, we explore the literature on the vulnerability of the urban poor to floods, droughts, and cholera in Sub-Saharan Africa. We particularly highlight the structural challenges and systemic inequalities that are increasing the vulnerability of the urban poor including the differential experiences of women and children. We conclude that poor people have: unequal opportunities to cope with shocks, being deprived from access to water services that wealthier households have; their needs are inequitably ignored; and cumulative vulnerability that reverberates climate shocks into smaller consequences that can have dramatic effects. Therefore, the pathways out of poverty are limited for the urban poor. This is not only due to factors of political economy such as the location and construction materials of houses, but also legacies of discrimination and their reproduction. Individual vulnerabilities are frequently increased due to the roles and responsibilities assigned to people of particular genders and/or ages. We find that these differential vulnerabilities are crucial yet poorly researched. There is also a lack of evidence for the manifold effects of drought on the urban poor. Building on the urban climate resilience literature we argue that policy makers and practitioners must consider who water security is for.

Despite worldwide advances in urban water security, equitable access to safely managed drinking water remains a challenge in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Piped water on premises is widely considered the gold standard for drinking water provision and is expanding rapidly in small and medium urban centres in LMICs. However, intermittency in urban water supply can lead to unreliability and water quality issues, posing a key barrier to equitable water security. Leveraging mixed methods and multiple data sets, this study investigates to what extent urban water security is equitable in a small town in Northern Ethiopia with almost uniform access to piped water services. We demonstrate that, despite widespread access to piped water on premises, there is considerable heterogeneity in household water insecurity. Development of a household water insecurity index considering issues of quality, quantity, and reliability, demonstrated high spatial variability in water security between households connected to the piped water system. Reliability of piped water supply did not equate to high water security in every case, as accessibility of appropriate alternative supplies and storage mediated water security. Urban water planning in LMICs must go beyond the physical expansion of household water connections to consider the implications of spatiality, intermittency of supply, and gendered socio-economic vulnerability to deliver equitable urban water security.

Urban water security is of critical global and local importance. Across many parts of low- and middle-income countries, urban water security either remains elusive or is becoming stressed. Rapid urbanisation and climate change are two key drivers of resource insecurity and at the forefront of urban water discourse. However, there are manifold and complex socio-political processes functioning alongside these megatrends that are often underemphasised. Drawing on three urban case studies in Ethiopia, we highlight these structural issues and the need for their continued consideration to fully understand and address urban water insecurity. Household water-use surveys, semi-structured interviews and participatory exercises with community residents, stakeholders and informal water vendors were used as part of a mixed-method approach in three urban areas. We found that government-managed urban water supplies were intermittent and unsafe, resulting in economic, health and time-use burdens for households, and that the socio-political dimensions reproducing urban water insecurity have historical roots. We argue that the uncertainty of climate change and unprecedented urbanisation do not offer sufficient explanation for why urban water insecurity persists. Moreover, we call for caution in only employing these narratives, to avoid obscuring deeply rooted challenges within socio-political systems. We call for socio-political processes to continue to be a central component of future interventions that seek to improve urban water insecurity.

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Climate resilient development has become the new paradigm for sustainable development influencing theory and practice across all sectors globally-gaining particular momentum in the water sector, since water security is intimately connected to climate change. Climate resilience is increasingly recognised as being inherently political, yet efforts often do not sufficiently engage with context-specific socio-ecological, cultural and political processes, including structural inequalities underlying historically produced vulnerabilities. Depoliticised approaches have been shown to pose barriers to concerted and meaningful change. In this article, world-leading water specialists from academic and practitioner communities reflect on, and share examples of, the importance of keeping people and politics at the centre of work on climate resilient water security. We propose a roadmap to meaningfully engage with the complex politics of climate resilient water security. It is critical to re-politicise climate resilience to enable efforts towards sustainable development goal 6-clean water and sanitation for all.