Howard et al. (2026) The Vulnerability and Resilience of Drinking Water Systems to Extreme Weather Events and Future Climate Change

Identification

• Journal: Current Environmental Health Reports
• Year: 2026
• Date: 2026-02-05
• Authors: Guy Howard, Lindsay Beevers, Katrina Charles, Anisha Nijhawan
• DOI: 10.1007/s40572-026-00524-y

Research Groups

• School of Civil, Aerospace and Design Engineering and Cabot Institute for the Environment, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
• School of Engineering, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
• School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

Short Summary

This review synthesizes current evidence on the climate resilience of the drinking water sector, examining how climate hazards are changing, how resilience is measured, and what interventions are being used. It concludes that climate change poses a major and increasing threat to drinking water supplies, but current actions to improve resilience are insufficient, and measurement methodologies remain fragmented.

Objective

• To review how climate hazards are affecting drinking water supplies.
• To assess current methodologies for measuring resilience in the drinking water sector.
• To identify and evaluate interventions being used to build resilience in drinking water systems.

Study Configuration

• Spatial Scale: Global, with specific examples and findings from various regions including Africa, Europe, the US, the UK, and low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and high-income countries (HICs).
• Temporal Scale: Review of current state of knowledge, recent findings (last decade), and future projections up to the end of the century.

Methodology and Data

• Models used: This is a review paper; it does not use primary models but discusses various frameworks and tools for assessing resilience, including:
  • Strategic Framework for WASH Climate Resilient Development (GWP and UNICEF)
  • How Tough is WASH framework
  • Climate Resilient Water Safety Plans
  • City Resilience Framework
  • City Water Resilience Framework
  • CREAT tool (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency)
• Data sources: Systematic reviews, meta-analyses, literature reviews, global statistics, recent data, and case studies from existing scientific literature and reports.

Main Results

• The frequency and intensity of climate hazards such as flooding and drought are increasing, posing significant threats to drinking water supplies.
• Water quality is deteriorating due to climate impacts, and risks from wildfire and sea-level rise are growing.
• Global land area affected by drought expanded by 74%, impacting 30% of global land area in 2022.
• Global flood risk from all sources could double by the end of the century under high-end warming scenarios.
• Multiple frameworks for measuring resilience are emerging, but no single, universally applied standard exists, leading to fragmented assessment.
• While a wide range of actions are known to build resilience, there is limited evidence of widespread uptake and robust evaluation of their performance.
• Non-utility water supplies (e.g., community-managed, private) are particularly vulnerable, with minimal investment in resilience measures.
• Health measures are largely absent from current resilience monitoring frameworks, representing a critical gap.

Contributions

• Provides a comprehensive synthesis of the current state of knowledge regarding the climate resilience of the global drinking water sector.
• Identifies and categorizes the evolving climate hazards impacting drinking water, including less studied threats like wildfire and sea-level rise.
• Critically evaluates existing approaches to measuring resilience, highlighting the lack of a standardized methodology and the need for consolidation.
• Assesses the uptake and performance of interventions aimed at building resilience, pointing out the insufficiency of current actions and the need for more robust evaluations.
• Emphasizes the particular vulnerability of non-utility water supplies and the limited attention they receive.
• Calls for the integration of health measures into resilience monitoring frameworks and the development of common methodologies for assessment.

Funding

No funding was received to prepare this review.

Citation

@article{Howard2026Vulnerability,
  author = {Howard, Guy and Beevers, Lindsay and Charles, Katrina and Nijhawan, Anisha},
  title = {The Vulnerability and Resilience of Drinking Water Systems to Extreme Weather Events and Future Climate Change},
  journal = {Current Environmental Health Reports},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.1007/s40572-026-00524-y},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1007/s40572-026-00524-y}
}