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With , and –related droughts and floods increasingly exacerbating the situation, the need to fundamentally transform the way we manage this most critical of global resources has never been more urgent.

But, as suggested by the wording of the UN’s – “Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all” – securing access to clean water is just one part of a two-part challenge. Sanitation is by far the more complex and costly issue to address, but it is what will lead to clean water, so the two must be considered concurrently.

Dr Jacqueline (Jacquie) Thomas, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Engineering at the School of Civil Engineering, explains that this is why her work tackles both issues hand in hand.

“My current work started out by looking at providing clean drinking water to reduce diarrhoeal disease, especially in children under five [],” she says. “But the reason the water is dirty is because of contamination from poor sanitation. So clean water is the end goal, but what is key is understanding what challenges communities are facing in trying to reach clean drinking water.”

These challenges can encompass not just environmental pollution, lack of sanitation infrastructure and increased demand for water due to population growth, but also social elements including cultural norms relating to water use, social and gender roles, divisions of responsibilities between local governments, community leaders and others, and availability of financial and other resources to fix the community’s sanitation problems.

“So it’s not just a technical approach,” Jacquie says of her work. “Tech is big part of it, but not all – we also need to work with communities to educate them to improve their own water and sanitation. 

“To be successful, this kind of work by its nature needs to be multidisciplinary, taking into account local politics, resource limitations, social roles, cultural norms and gender roles as well as available technologies, infrastructure and so on. For a project to succeed, all those elements need to be aligned. If a piece of the puzzle is missing, the project will not work well, or it will be rejected by the community and it won’t be used at all.

“That’s why I really like this work,” she adds. “I’m not a classic environmental engineer – I’m a water, sanitation and hygiene (WaSH)–focused engineer, so I take a wholistic approach to these issues while considering all the complexities of work in international low-resource settings.”