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Sustainable Sanitations for Emergencies and Reconstruction Situations

This factsheet addresses current developments, challenges, gaps and solutions in the planning and implementation fo sustainable sanitation for emergencies and reconstruuction situations focusing on low and middle income countries. It is mainly intended for students, researchers, policy makers and practitioners. Shortcomings of current approaches for emergency prevention and relief include: Insufficient resources invested in santitation, lack of prioritisation of sustainable solutions, inadequate human resource capacity for urban sanitation in humanitarian agencies and lack of good governance for reducing disaster risks. The last issue particularly impacts the risk reduction potential of countries. To reduce the risk and potential effects of disasters, sanitation solutions need to be robust to buffer against certain challenging environments. In emergency situations, groups with specific needs need to be considered and appropriate emergency relief measures for each stage of an emergency situation need to be selected. Recommendations for emergencies include increase funding for sanitation in emergency and reconstruction situations, when implementing immediate sanitation solutions, apply those which can be adapted in later phases to become more permanent and sustainable, use adequate sanitation options which are robust and can cope with challenging environments, build capacity in local entrepeneurship for long-term self-help in the reconstruction phase, incorporate risk reducing measures in local and urban planning to prevent and reduce the need for response efforts in between emergencies, engage in learning activities and experiment together with other professionals to increase innovation of options.

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