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This chapter reflects on the approach and learning of an innovative project in Bangladesh that addresses drinking water security issues of the poor and marginal communities through participatory research, innovation, and social mobilization. The people, living in the most difficult geophysical areas, are facing severe crisis of drinking water and associated health risks due to remoteness, seasonality, social isolation, and poor institutional links. The geophysical constraints such as growing salinity, arsenic, flood and drought, and drawdown of groundwater tables have aggravated the problems. The existing government services hardly reach to the most unserved and needy people because of remoteness and lack of responsiveness of the government departments. A participatory action research project led to collective understanding about the severity of the problems and associated health risks and vulnerability. This again built greater awareness and motivated the poor, women, and marginal communities to establish links with key actors and take various local and collective actions toward ensuring their greater access to drinking water, sanitation facilities, and health services from the relevant government departments and development agencies.

This chapter studies the link between urban planning and health. Access to safe drinking water is already a very serious issue for large urban populations in fast-growing economies such as India. Water availability is further being impacted by climate change, leading to the drastically increased spread of water-related diseases.

Leh Town, which is located in an ecologically vulnerable semi-arid region of the Himalayas in Ladakh, has been considered for this study because it is undergoing large-scale transformation due to rapid growth in its tourism industry. In 2012–2013 our interdisciplinary group comprising researchers from Germany and India conducted field surveys, including geographic information system-based (GIS) mapping of point sources of water pollution, questionnaire surveys of 200 households and 70 hotels and guesthouses and semi-structured interviews. We also reviewed secondary medical data.

We found that diarrhoeal incidence has increased in the local population in Leh in the past decade, which may be linked to water pollution: Further, we found that rapidly increasing water consumption coupled with a lack of adequate water and sanitation infrastructure is causing serious water pollution.

Further, data is needed for causal connections between water pollution and health impacts to be conclusively drawn.

This study discusses the use of GIS to support a call for the need for more integrated urban planning and decision-making that holistically addresses water and health challenges in Leh and advocates the development of a decentralized or hybrid sanitation system to support water resources conservation as a central dimension of an integrated health management approach.

GIS is also a very useful platform for supporting participatory urban planning in Leh.

With such an integrated urban planning approach, Leh would be a lighthouse example for other towns in the region.

This chapter discusses the DRENURBS initiative in Belo Horizonte, a program for urban water drainage using natural ecosystems, using the sociotechnical framework. DRENURBS transformed the logic of canalizing water streams into a new, nature-based solution with significant positive impacts on biodiversity and social benefits. Following a theoretical debate on sustainability transition and innovation concepts, this chapter seeks to map the essential elements for building a successful institutional framework in the public sector for urban biodiversity improvements.

Most poverty research has explored monetary poverty. This chapter presents and analyzes the global multidimensional poverty index (MPI) estimations for China. Using China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), we find China’s global MPI was 0.035 in 2010 and decreased significantly to 0.017 in 2014. The dimensional composition of MPI suggests that nutrition, education, safe drinking water, and cooking fuel contribute most to overall non-monetary poverty in China. Such analysis is also applied to subgroups, including geographic areas (rural/urban, east/central/west, provinces), as well as social characteristics such as gender of the household heads, age, education level, marital status, household size, migration status, ethnicity, and religion. We find the level and composition of poverty differs significantly across certain subgroups. We also find high levels of mismatch between monetary and multidimensional poverty at the household level, which highlights the importance of using both complementary measures to track progress in eradicating poverty.

Although more than 71 per cent of the Earth is covered by water, 97 per cent of that volume is saltwater held in the oceans. Of the remaining water, 2 per cent is freshwater locked away in snow and ice, leaving less than 1 per cent available for human requirements (Williams, 2016). Yet, water is crucial for human survival. Therefore, access to water must be recognised as a fundamental human right. In 2010, the United Nations adopted Resolution 64/292 which explicitly recognises the human right to water and sanitation, acknowledges that clean drinking water and sanitation are essential for the realisation of all human rights, and seeks to protect water as a national resource and the people that need it the most. Despite the adoption of the aforementioned Resolution, water remains a hugely pertinent issue across the world, particularly in areas where water is considered predominantly as a tradeable commodity. Hence, Water and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the 2015 UN-Water Annual International Zaragoza Conference are extremely important in terms of water protection, preservation and sustainable development. This chapter discusses access to water as a fundamental precondition of life, noting that the Republic of Slovenia became one of the first countries in the world to include the human right to water in its Constitution in 2017. The authors believe that this is an excellent example for other countries to change their legislation in favour of protecting the fundamental human right to access to water. It also presents further possibilities for achieving SDG 6.1 (and other SDGs related to water) in practice.