The Oxford Encyclopedia of Water, Sanitation, and Global Health
The provision of adequate supplies of safe potable drinking water and the management of human wastewater and excreta have been among the most important public health success stories in industrialized countries over the past 150 years. But today many human communities in the Global South still confront the same challenges and use many of the same technologies developed by our ancestors. Approximately 20% of total mortality risk for children under 5 years of age in developing countries is due to diseases related to poor water and sanitation.
Over the past several decades, rapid progress has been made in extending improved water and sanitation infrastructure to poor households in the Global South. Childhood mortality rates are declining in developing countries and the rate of this decline is accelerating. The question of how to make even faster progress in providing poor households in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and the slums of megacities in the Global South with improved services has now hit numerous obstacles. Climate change will make the provision of improved water and sanitation services more difficult. Importantly, water utilities in cities of the Global South typically run large financial deficits. Because they sell water and sanitation services far below cost, they have no financial resources to make the investments needed to minimize the risks associated with climate change. The proposed encyclopedia on water and health will provide readers with the most up-to-date thinking on these water and health challenges from leading scholars from around the world. The authors will come from a variety of disciplines (e.g., economics, sociology, engineering, public health, hydrology), and offer different, sometimes conflicting perspectives on both the problems and solutions. The contributions will focus on both current and evolving conditions and different policy interventions.
Editor in Chief
Professor Dale Whittington, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA), Manchester Business School (UK), and the Institute of Water Policy, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore
Editorial Board
Grace Beeler - North Carolina State University
Clarissa Brocklehurst - Gillings School of Global Public Health, University of North Carolina
Leong Ching - Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, and Associate Director of the Institute of Water Policy, National University of Singapore
Andrés Gomez-Lobo - University of Chile
Masahiro Hashizume – The University of Tokyo
Diana Mitlin- The University of Manchester
Céline Nauges- Toulouse School of Economics
Brad Wong – Mettalytics and Copenhagen Consensus Center
Topics
Understanding Water, Sanitation, and Health: Status Quo Conditions & the Dynamic Baseline
Policy Interventions: What can be Done? What works?
Organizing Information for Decision-making
