Closing the cycle? Potential and limitations of Water and Sanitation Safety Plans (WSSPs) for Latin American metropolitan areas

Globally, the use of untreated, often diluted, or partly treated wastewater in agriculture covers about 30 million ha, far exceeding the area under the planned use of well-treated (reclaimed) wastewater which has been estimated in this paper at around 1.0 million ha. This gap has likely increased over the last decade despite significant investments in treatment capacities, due to the even larger increases in population, water consumption, and wastewater generation. To minimize the human health risks from unsafe wastewater irrigation, the WHO’s related 2006 guidelines suggest a broader concept than the previous (1989) edition by emphasizing, especially for low-income countries, the importance of risk-reducing practices from ‘farm to fork’. This shift from relying on technical solutions to facilitating and monitoring human behaviour change is, however, challenging. Another challenge concerns local capacities for quantitative risk assessment and the determination of a risk reduction target. Being aware of these challenges, the WHO has invested in a sanitation safety planning manual which has helped to operationalize the rather academic 2006 guidelines, but without addressing key questions, e.g., on how to trigger, support, and sustain the expected behaviour change, as training alone is unlikely to increase the adoption of health-related practices. This review summarizes the perceived challenges and suggests several considerations for further editions or national adaptations of the WHO guidelines.

Section: Gain Overall Efficiency By Thinking Out Of the Wastewater Do...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The WHO Guidelines for Safe Wastewater Use in Agriculture: A Review of Implementation Challenges and Possible Solutions in the Global South

Drechsel

Qadir

Galibourg

2022

“…SSP provides an alternative approach to First Nations wastewater management in Canada because it prioritizes and relies on local knowledge to identify, address, and monitor context-specific hazards along the entire sanitation chain within a community and promotes the development of community-appropriate multibarrier risk reduction [19]. The SSP methodology brings together actors and stakeholders from multiple sectors and has the potential to improve communication and facilitate joint problem-solving [17,20]. Because SSPs should be developed collaboratively between communities and key agencies, the process allows the inclusion of First Nations perspectives of water and water protection by including community stakeholders [13,[21][22][23].…”

Section: Sanitation Safety Planningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the Use of a Sanitation Safety Plan Framework to Identify Key Hazards in First Nations Wastewater Systems

Lane

Fuller

Stanhope

et al. 2021

First Nations communities in Canada have a documented history of sub-standard water quality. While efforts have been made to address drinking water quality, little has been done to address longstanding challenges in wastewater systems. This study developed a hazard identification checklist using a sanitation safety plan (SSP) framework to characterize potential hazards in 29 First Nations wastewater systems in Atlantic Canada. System types included in this study included centralized, decentralized, and municipal transfer agreements (MTAs). Using past system assessment reports, potential hazardous events were evaluated along the sanitation chain to assess risk within systems. Overall, 69% of hazardous events had an unknown level of risk while 7% were high-risk. This research found that decentralized systems and MTAs have poorly characterized risk due to a lack of documentation and communication. The presence of significant knowledge deficits and high-risk hazards in centralized systems cause risk propagation and accumulation along the sanitation chain, resulting in potential effluent quality concerns. This desktop study demonstrates that an SSP approach offers an alternative assessment process to the regulatory approach currently being used by proposing an enhanced systemic understanding of risk that can inform management practices and integrate the plurality of stakeholders involved in these systems.

“…With a subtropical climate, characterized by a dry period between the months of April and November, the region has experienced unplanned urban expansion on a matrix of rural features. The development of public and private urban development projects, together with informal settlements, demands ever greater volumes of water for domestic use, in the context of an uncertain situation regarding water availability [9,36]. Although centralized water and sanitation services have a well-established legal framework, decentralized onsite management has not been included in the legislation yet.…”

Section: Study Areamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…AOI 1 and 2 are described in more detail in Figure 6. Recent assessments in the area evidenced serious contamination of the shallow aquifer as a consequence of the lack of control of the ODWTS and the suboptimal Environmental and Planning Factors [9,30,46]. The sector is the recharge zone of La Caldera aquifer, which supplies water not only to the town of Vaqueros, but also to the north of the city of Salta, through extraction wells.…”

Section: Aptitude For Odwtsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In most cases, metropolitan areas in developing countries include informal settlements, different kinds of public housing developments and consolidated urban sectors coexisting in a highly complex scenario. In suburban areas, the last sections of the centralized network usually coexist with decentralized and mainly informal and unregulated Onsite Domestic Wastewater Treatment Systems (ODWTS), especially onsite forms, where septic tanks are the most widely used devices [7][8][9]. In Argentina, for instance, there is no clear environmental legislation that includes ODWTS as a formal component of sanitation, nor is there a suitable institutional arrangement and legal framework for integrated urban management of water and sanitation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

A Simple Method for Identifying Appropriate Areas for Onsite Wastewater Treatment

Iribarnegaray

Correa

Sorani

et al. 2021

Self Cite

Onsite Domestic Wastewater Treatment Systems (ODWTS) are increasingly important for treating domestic wastewater in metropolitan contexts, especially in suburban sectors isolated from sewer networks and centralized treatment plants. When ODWTS are not correctly planned and located in suitable places, or are not properly designed, they can cause groundwater contamination and generate risks for human health. This work presents a Spatial Decision Support System (SDSS) to zone specific areas based on a few simple parameters. The proposed tool can be easily adapted to different contexts, even where institutional capacities are low. Results obtained in the metropolitan area of the Lerma Valley (Salta, Argentina) show strong contradictions between our zoning and current urbanization features in the study area. As a result, environmental impacts and health hazards are likely to manifest in the short or medium term. The sectors with the best receptivity conditions were found in the southern sector of the study area. We argue that ODWTS can be safely implemented in many areas as long as this concept is embedded in urban planning initiatives, which usually also require the consolidation or development of appropriate institutions and control systems.