Poor Sanitation Causes Disease and Death Globally. Climate Change Will Only Make It Worse.
From dilapidated sewer systems in the US and Europe to a shortage of toilets and clean water in Global South cities, poor sanitation is breeding disease and death around the world. The climate crisis will only make its impacts more severe.
A woman crosses a sewage canal in the slum district of Freetown, Sierra Leone, on April 15, 2022. (John Wessels / AFP via Getty Images)
Across the globe, more than half of the urban population lacks access to safe sanitation. Yet this crisis is often shunted to the political sidelines or thought of as a narrow engineering problem, rather than seen for what it is: a crisis of social provisioning at the center of urban politics.
In his recent book, Waste and the City: The Crisis of Sanitation and the Right to Citylife, Colin McFarlane shows how sanitation infrastructure is failing around the world, from urbanizing neighborhoods at the outskirts of cities in South Asia to aging infrastructure in the UK, and discusses how sanitation is intertwined with broader dynamics of city life and social relations.
Sara Van Horn and Cal Turner spoke with McFarlane for Jacobin about the gendered and racialized impacts of the sanitation crisis, the failures of “eco-sanitation,” and how we can build a political movement for sanitation for all.
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