Climate change presents a major threat to water and sanitation services. There is an urgent need to understand and improve resilience, particularly in rural communities and small towns in low- and middle-income countries that already struggle to provide universal access to services and face increasing threats from climate change. To date, there is a lack of a simple framework to assess the resilience of water and sanitation services which hinders the development of strategies to improve services. An interdisciplinary team of engineers and environmental and social scientists were brought together to investigate the development of a resilience measurement framework for use in low- and middle-income countries. Six domains of interest were identified based on a literature review, expert opinion, and limited field assessments in two countries. A scoring system using a Likert scale is proposed to assess the resilience of services and allow analysis at local and national levels to support improvements in individual supplies, identifying systematic faults, and support prioritisation for action. This is a simple, multi-dimensional framework for assessing the resilience of rural and small-town water and sanitation services in LMICs. The framework is being further tested in Nepal and Ethiopia and future results will be reported on its application. ... Read more

Aquifer Thermal Energy Storage (ATES) is an innovative building technology that can be used to store thermal energy in natural subsurface formations [1, 4, 10]. In combination with a heat pump, ATES can reduce the energy demand of larger buildings by more than half, which has made the technology increasingly popular in northern Europe (see Figure 1). Furthermore, the climate and subsurface conditions required for ATES use can be found in areas across Europe, Asia and North America. By the middle of the century, roughly half of the world’s urban population is therefore expected to live in areas technically suitable for ATES [2]. ... Read more