Financing Wastewater Management

Water Pollution Control - A Guide to the Use of Water Quality Management Principles Edited by Richard Helmer and Ivanildo Hespanhol Published on behalf of the United Nations Environment Programme, the Water Supply & Sanitation Collaborative Council and the World Health Organization by E. & F. Spon © 1997 WHO/UNEP ISBN 0 419 22910 8 Chapter 7* - Financing Wastewater Management * This chapter was prepared by C.R. Bartone and based on Bartone (1995). The views expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the World Bank or its affiliates 7.1 Introduction Urban sanitation is a priority issue for cities everywhere. Major deficiencies in the provision of this basic service contribute to environmental health problems and the degradation of scarce water resources. The rapid growth of cities and the accompanying concentration of population leads to increasing amounts of human wastes that need to be managed safely. The relative success in providing cities with usable water has led to greater volumes of wastewater requiring management, both domestic and industrial. As population densities in cities increase, the volumes of wastewater generated per household exceed the infiltration capacity of local soils and require greater drainage capacity and the introduction of sewer systems. Wastewaters flowing out of cities can, in turn, affect downstream water resources and threaten their sustainable use. The mix of problems and the capacity to deal with these sanitation problems varies amongst cities and countries. Table 7.1 provides a simple typology of the problems according to national economic development levels. Confronting these problems requires an ability to face a number of challenges, including different environmental health challenges as well as financial, institutional and technical challenges. 7.2 The challenges of urban sanitation The environmental health challenges facing the urban sanitation subsector in developing countries are of two types (Serageldin, 1994). First, there is the "old agenda" of providing all urban households with adequate sanitation services. Second, there is the "new agenda" of managing urban wastewater safely and protecting the quality of vital water resources for present and future populations. The relative importance of each agenda normally depends upon the level of development as illustrated in Table 7.1, although these two "agendas" coexist in most cities of the developing world, even in some of the most modern cities. Table 7.1 Economic-environmental typology of urban sanitation problems Urban sanitation problems Lower-income countries (< US$ 650 per capita) Lower middleincome countries (US$ 650-2,500 per capita) Upper middle-income Upper-income countries (US$ countries (> US$ 2,500-6,500 per 6,500 per capita) capita) Access to basic sanitation services Low coverage, especially for urban poor; mainly nonsewered options Low access for urban poor; increasing use of sewerage Generally acceptable Good coverage; coverage; higher mainly sewered sewerage levels Wastewater treatment Virtually no treatment Few treatment facilities; poorly operated Increasing treatment Generally high capacity; operational treatment levels; deficiencies major investments over past 30 years Water pollution issues Health problems from inadequate sanitation and raw domestic sewage "in the streets" Severe health problems from untreated municipal discharge Severe pollution problems from poorly treated municipal and mixed industrial discharges Primarily concerned with amenity value and toxic substances Source: Adapted from Bartone, et al., 1994 7.2.1 Basic sanitation services for urban households The provision of sanitation services, including sewerage, has not kept pace with population growth in urban areas. Despite this, the significant progress that was achieved by countries during the 1980s has resulted in a 50 per cent increase in the number of urban people with adequate sanitation facilities (see Figure 7.1). These achievements, although impressive, were not sufficient because the number of people without adequate sanitation actually increased by 70 million in the same period, and as many remained unserved as were provided with service. The results of a recent survey by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) in 63 countries are shown in Figure 7.2 (WHO/UNICEF, 1993). These results distinguish between the type of sanitation services reaching the upper and lower income urban populations. The health consequences of the service shortfalls are enormous and fall most heavily on the urban poor. In most low-income communities, the pollutant of primary concern is human excreta. It has been reported by WHO that 3.2 million children under the age of five die each year in the developing world from diarrhoeal diseases, largely as a result of poor sanitation, contaminated drinking water and associated problems of food hygiene (WHO, 1992). Infectious and parasitic diseases linked to contaminated water are the third leading cause of productive years lost to morbidity and mortality in the developing world (World Bank, 1993a). Diarrhoeal death rates are typically about 60 per cent lower among children living in households with adequate water and sanitation facilities than those in households without such facilities (World Bank, 1992). Figure 7.1 Access to urban sanitation in developing countries, 1980-90 (After World Bank, 1992) Figure 7.2 Urban sanitation by technology type and income (After WHO/UNICEF, 1993) An increasing share of urban sanitation services are being provided by sewerage, especially in middle-income countries. About 40 per cent of the urban population is served by sewers. User contributions, however, have been low and public subsidies for these household services have benefited primarily the middle-class and rich. This has left few public resources to be spent on sewage treatment and safe disposal. Looking to the future, the challenge of the next two decades dwarfs the progress made in the past decade; some 1,300 million new urban residents will require sanitation services in addition to those presently without service. In total, this is roughly six times the increase in service provided during the 1980s. Clearly, the aim of providing all urban households with adequate sanitation services still poses large financial, institutional and technical challenges. 7.2.2 Urban wastewater management and pollution control A "new agenda" of environmentally sustainable development has emerged forcefully, and appropriately, in recent years. One aspect of sustainable development is the quality of the water environment which is seen as a global concern about sustainable water resources. The situation in cities in developing countries is especially acute. Even in middle-income countries, sewage is rarely treated. Buenos Aires, for example, treats only 2 per cent of its sewage, a percentage that is typical for the middle-income countries of Latin America. There is also the problem of uncontrolled industrial discharges into municipal sewers, increasing organic loads and introducing a range of chemical contaminants that can damage sewers, interrupt treatment processes, and create toxic and other hazards. As shown in Figure 7.3, water quality is far worse in developing countries than in industrialised countries. Furthermore, while environmental quality in industrialised countries improved through the 1980s, it did not improve in middle-income countries, and even declined sharply in lower-income countries. The costs of this degradation can be seen in many ways. The vast majority of rivers in and around cities in developing countries are little more than open sewers. Not only do these degrade the aesthetic quality of life in the city, but they constitute a reservoir for cholera and other water-related diseases. The cause of the major outbreak of cholera in Peru in 1991 could be traced to inadequate urban sanitation and water contamination. It cost the Peruvian economy over US$ 150 million in 1991-92 in direct and indirect health impacts (WASH, 1993). Similarly, the otherwise inexplicable persistence of typhoid in Santiago over four decades has been attributed to the pollution of irrigation waters by untreated metropolitan discharges (Ferreccio, 1995). Energetic emergency measures, taken as a result of the Latin American cholera outbreak in 1991, prevented the spread of cholera in Santiago and brought typhoid under control with estimated savings in direct and indirect health costs in the order of US$ 77 million (World Bank, 1994c). The costs of urban water pollution also create an additional burden for cities in the form of higher water supply costs (Figure 7.4). In metropolitan Lima, for example, the cost of upstream pollution has increased water treatment costs by about 30 per cent. In Shanghai, China, water intakes had to be moved upstream more than 40 km at a cost of about US$ 300 million (World Bank, 1992). Figure 7.3 Dissolved oxygen concentrations in rivers in developing and developed countries (After World Bank, 1992) 7.2.3 Connection between sanitation services and environmental issues To understand the connection between sanitation services and environmental issues, it is necessary to consider the sequence in which people demand water supply and sanitation services. For a family which migrates into a shanty-town, the first environmental priority is to secure an adequate water supply at reasonable cost. This is followed shortly by the need to secure a private, convenient and sanitary place for defecation. Families show a high willingness to pay for these household or private services, in part because the alternatives are so costly. Accordingly, they pressure local and national governments to provide such services, and in the early stages of economic development much external assistance goes to meeting the strong demand for these services. The very success in meeting these primary needs, however, gives rise to a second generation of demands, namely for the removal of wastewater from the household, then from the neighbourhood and then from the city. As cities succeed in meeting this demand another problem arises, namely the protection of the environment from the degrading effects of such large and concentrated pollution loads. Figure 7.4 How the cost of water supply is increasing (After World Bank, 1992) This succession of demands has been observed in the historic experience of the industrialised countries and in the contemporary experience of developing countries. Thus it is no surprise that the portfolio of external assistance agencies has focused heavily on the provision of water supply. For example, World Bank lending for water and sanitation over the past 30 years has only included about 15 per cent for sanitation and sewerage, with most of this spent on sewage collection and only a small fraction spent on treatment. In a description of the Orangi Pilot Project in Karachi, Pakistan, Hasan (1995) describes how forcefully poor people demand environmental services, once the primary demand for water supply is met, and how it is possible to respond to the challenge of these new demands. 7.3 The financial challenges Completing the supply of basic sanitation services and making progress on wastewater management and pollution control creates major financial challenges for developing countries. Mobilising the necessary financial resources requires both recognising the need for an urban sanitation subsector and reliance on new ways of financing urban sanitation, sewerage and wastewater management. 7.3.1 Responding to the demands of households and communities In recent years there has been a remarkable consensus on market-friendly and environment-friendly policies for managing water resources and for delivering water and sanitation services on an efficient, equitable and sustainable basis. At the heart of this consensus are three closely related guiding principles expressed at the 1992 Dublin International Conference on Water and the Environment, namely: • The ecosystem principle. Planners and policy makers at all levels should take a holistic approach linking social and economic management with protection of natural systems. • The institutional principle. Water development and management should be based on a participatory approach, involving user, planners and policy makers at all levels, with decisions taken at the lowest appropriate level. • The instrument principle. Water has an economic value in all its competing uses and should be recognised as an economic good. The challenge facing the urban sanitation subsector is to put these general principles into operation and to translate them into practice on the ground. The new consensus gives prime importance to a central principle of public finance, i.e. that efficiency and equity both require that private resources should be used for financing private goods and that public resources should be used only for financing public goods. Implicit in this principle is a belief that social units themselves, whether households, commercial organisations, urban communities or river basin associations, are in the best position to weigh the costs and benefits of different levels of investment. The vital issue in the application of this principle to the urban sanitation subsector is the definition of the decision unit and the definition of what is internal (private) and external (public) to that unit. It is useful to think of the different levels at which such units may be defined, as illustrated in Figure 7.5. For each level, the demand for sanitation services must be understood, and each social unit should pay for the direct service benefits it receives. To illustrate the application of this emerging ideal, it is necessary to consider how urban sanitation should be financed. 7.3.2 Sanitation, sewerage and wastewater management The benefits from improved sanitation, and therefore the appropriate financing arrangements, are complex. At the lowest level (see Figure 7.5), households place high value on sanitation services that provide them with a private, convenient and odour-free facility which removes excreta and wastewater from the property or confines it appropriately on-site. However, there are clearly benefits which accrue at a more aggregate level and are, therefore, "externalities" from the point of view of the household. Willingness-to-pay studies (see, for example, Ducci (1991)) have shown consistently that households are willing to pay for the first category of service benefits, but have little or no interest in paying for external (environmental) benefits that they consider beyond their concern. Figure 7.5 Levels of decision-making on water and sanitation (After Serageldin, 1994) At the next level (i.e. the block) households in a particular block value services which remove excreta from the block as a whole. Moving up a level, to that of the neighbourhood, residents value services which remove excreta and wastewater from the neighbourhood, or which render these wastes innocuous through treatment. Similarly, at the level of the city, the removal and/or treatment of wastes from the city and its surroundings are valued. Cities, however, do not exist in isolation - wastes discharged from one city pollute the water supply of downstream cities and of other users. Accordingly, groups of cities (as well as farms and industries and others) in a river basin can perceive the collective benefit of environmental improvement. Finally, because the health and well-being of a nation as a whole may be affected by environmental degradation in one particular river basin, there are sometimes additional national economic, health and environmental benefits from wastewater management in that basin. The example of typhoid in Santiago (World Bank, 1994c; Ferreccio, 1995) illustrates the latter point. The fundamental principle of public finance is that costs should be assigned to different levels in this hierarchy according to the benefits accruing at the different levels. This suggests that the financing of sanitation, sewerage and wastewater treatment should be allocated approximately as follows: • Households pay the cost incurred in providing on-site facilities (bathrooms, toilets, sewerage connections). • The residents of a block collectively pay the additional cost incurred in collecting the wastes from individual homes and transporting these to the boundary of the block. • The residents of a neighbourhood collectively pay the additional cost incurred in collecting the wastes from blocks and transporting these to the boundary of the neighbourhood (or of treating the neighbourhood wastes). • The residents of a city collectively pay the additional cost incurred in collecting the wastes from blocks and transporting these to the boundary of the city (or of treating the city wastes). • The stakeholders in a river basin (cities, farmers, industries and environmentalists) collectively assess the value of different levels of water quality within a basin and decide on the level of quality they wish to pay for, and on the distribution of responsibility for paying for the necessary treatment and water quality management activities. • The nation, for the achievement of broader public health or environmental benefits, may decide to pay collectively for meeting more stringent treatment standards. Sanitation and sewerage Although there are complicating factors to be taken into account (including transaction costs of collection of revenues at different levels and the inter-connectedness of several of the benefits), the principles discussed above are reflected both in the way some industrialised countries finance sewerage investments and in the most innovative and appropriate forms of subsector financing observed in developing countries. In many communities in the USA, for example, households and commercial organisations pay for sewer connections, primary sewer networks are financed by a sewer levy charged to all property owners along the streets served, and secondary sewers and major collectors and interceptors are often financed by improvement levies on all property owners in the serviced areas. Innovative sewerage financing schemes are now being observed in developing country cities. In Orangi, an informal urban settlement in Karachi, a hierarchical scheme for financing sewerage services has developed in which households pay the costs of their "on-lot" (i.e. on-site) services (e.g. latrines and septic tanks), the primary sewers are paid for by the households along the "lane" (public passageway between rows of houses), contiguous "lanes" pool their resources to pay for neighbourhood sewers, and the city (via the Municipal Development Authority) pays for trunk sewers (Hasan, 1995). The arrangements for financing condominial sewers by the urban poor in Brazil (see Box 7.1) follow a remarkably similar pattern; households pay for the on-site costs, blocks pay for the block sewers (and decide what level of service they want from these), with the water company or municipality paying for the trunk sewers. Box 7.1 The condominial sewerage system in Brazil The "condominial" system is the brainchild of Jose Carlos de Melo, a socially committed engineer from Recife. The name condominial was given for two reasons. First, a block of houses was treated like a horizontal apartment building (or condominial in Portuguese) (see figure). Second, "Condominial" was a popular Brazilian soap opera and associated with the best in urban life. As is evident in the figure, the result is a radically different layout, with a shorter grid of smaller and shallower "feeder" sewers running through the backyards and with the effects of shallower connections to the mains rippling through the system. These innovations cut construction costs to between 20 and 30 per cent of those of a conventional system. The more fundamental and radical innovation, however, is the active involvement of the population in choosing their level of service, and in operating and maintaining the "feeder" infrastructure. The key elements are that families can choose to continue with their current sanitation system, to connect to a conventional waterborne system or to connect to a condominial system. If a family chooses to connect to a condominial system, it has to pay a connection charge, which can be financed by the water company, and a monthly tariff. If on the other hand, the family wants a conventional connection, it has to pay an initial cost and a monthly tariff (both of which are about three times higher) reflecting the different capital and operating costs. Families are free to continue with their current system, which usually means a holding tank discharging into an open street drain. In most cases, however, those families who, initially, chose not to connect eventually end up connecting. Either they succumb to heavy pressure from their neighbours or they find the build-up of wastewater in and around their houses intolerable once the (connected) neighbours fill in the rest of the open drain. Individual households are responsible for maintaining the feeder sewers, with the formal agency maintaining only the trunk mains. This increases the communities' sense of responsibility for the system. Also, the misuse of any portion of the feeder system, for example by putting solid waste down the toilet, soon shows up in a blockage in the neighbour's portion of the sewer. The rapid, direct and informed feedback to the misuser virtually eliminates the need to educate the users of the system in the "acceptable and unacceptable" and results in fewer blockages than in conventional systems. Finally, because of the greatly reduced responsibility of the wastewater utility, its operating costs are sharply reduced. The condominial system is now providing service to hundreds of thousands of urban people in northeast Brazil and is being replicated on a large scale throughout the country. The danger, however, is that the clever engineering is seen as "the system". Where the community and organisational aspects have been missing, the technology has worked poorly (as in Joinville, Santa Catarina) or not at all (as in the Baixada Fluminense in Rio de Janeiro). Source: Briscoe, 1993; de Melo, 1985 Lack of access to credit may impede investment in sanitation, drainage and other essential urban environmental services, especially in small cities and towns. This problem has been overcome in some cases by creating special municipal development funds or rotating funds to finance environmental investments. For example, the World Bank has supported the creation of municipal development funds in the State of Minas Gerais, Brazil, for environmental improvements in small cities and towns, and in Mexico for municipal water supply, sewerage and solid waste investments in intermediate cities. Box 7.2 Co-operative Housing Foundation Sanitation Loan Programme in Honduras Noting the need and demand for sanitary improvements, the Co-operative Housing Foundation (CHF), an international NGO, helped to establish a lending programme for various types of latrines and toilets, showers and laundry and wash areas. A sanitation loan fund was created to make small, short-term loans that are affordable to informal settlement residents around Tegucigalpa. Loans range in size from US$ 100-400 and are made through local nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) (i.e. non-traditional finance organisations). The loans are based on several important principles, which include matching the loan amount with the expected result and securing the loan through community-based mechanisms (for example by co-signing) rather than the traditional mortgage approach. The key elements of the Honduras model are: • It is responsive to individual and community demand. • It includes a sustainable revolving loan programme. • It emphasises local NGO capacity enhancement. • It seeks to stimulate the local economy. • A range of technologies are offered. • Health education is a condition (integral part) of the loan. Source: Hermanson, 1994 Similarly, poor urban households need mechanisms to finance sewer connections and in-home sanitary facilities. Some cities provide credit to poor households for these investments that can be paid off in instalment payments (not subsidised) over periods of three to five years. Where there are well-managed water and sewerage utilities, the instalment payments can be collected as part of the monthly water bill. In some cases, households can provide "sweat equity" (labour inputs provided by the community for self-help construction schemes) or even make partial payment in the form of construction materials. A special sanitation credit fund has been established in Honduras (Box 7.2) for poor urban households, fashioned along the lines of the well-known Grameen rural credit bank in Bangladesh. Such experiences show that the urban poor will invest in a healthier environment if they can spread the initial costs over time. Similarly, innovative schemes for providing urban households access to credit for sanitation investments have been demonstrated in Lesotho (Blackett, 1994) and in Burkina Faso (Ouayoro, 1995). Wastewater treatment Even when the appropriate financing and institutional principles are followed, very difficult issues can still arise with respect to the financing of wastewater treatment facilities. In industrial countries, two very different models are used. In many industrialised countries, the approach followed has been to set universal environmental standards and then to raise the funds necessary to finance the required investments. It is becoming increasingly evident that such an approach is proving to be very expensive and not financially feasible, even in the richest countries of the world. In the UK, the target date for compliance with the water quality standards of the European Union (EU) is being reviewed as customers' bills rise astronomically to pay the huge costs involved (over US$ 60,000 million this decade). In the USA, US$ 56,000 million in federal construction grants were provided to local governments from 1972-89 to build mandated secondary treatment facilities, but these grants have now been eliminated (and replaced by State revolving funds for loans to municipalities) at the same time that increasingly stringent environmental standards are being proposed. Many local governments are now refusing to comply with the unfunded mandates of the Federal Government (Austin, 1994). The city of San Diego, for example, has refused to spend US$ 5,000 million on federally-mandated secondary treatment, arguing that it is more cost-effective to use long, coastal outfalls for sewage disposal. San Diego brought suit against the Federal Government and recently won its case in the federal courts (Mearns, 1994). The US National Research Council has advocated a change in which costs and benefits are both taken into account in the management of sewage, with a shift to a water quality-based approach at the coastal zone, watershed or basin level (National Research Council, 1993). In a few countries, a different model has been developed. In these countries, river basin institutions have been put into place which: • Ensure broad participation in the setting of standards, and in making the trade-offs between cost and water quality. • Ensure that available resources are spent on those investments which yield the highest environmental return. • Use economic instruments to encourage users and polluters to reduce the adverse environmental impacts of their activities. These institutional arrangements are described more fully below. In river basins in Germany and France, and more recently in Brazil, river basin financing and management models are applied in order to raise resources for wastewater treatment and water quality management from users and polluters in the basin. The stakeholders, including users and polluters as well as citizens' groups, are involved in deciding the level of resources to be raised and the consequent level of environmental quality they wish to "purchase". This system has proved to be efficient, robust and flexible in meeting the financing needs of the densely industrialised Ruhr Valley for 80 years, and for the whole of France since the early 1960s (see Box 7.3). There is growing evidence that if such participatory agencies were developed, people would be willing to pay substantial amounts for environmental improvement, even in developing countries (Serageldin, 1994). In the state of Espirito Santo in Brazil, a household survey showed that families were willing to pay 1.4 times the cost of sewage collection systems, but 2.3 times the higher cost of a sewage collection and treatment system. In the Rio Doce Valley, an industrial basin of nearly three million people in south-east Brazil, a river basin authority (like those in France) is in the process of being developed. Stakeholders have indicated that they are willing to pay about US$ 1,000 million over a five-year period for environmental improvement. In the Philippines, recent surveys show that households are often prepared to make substantial payments for investments which will improve the quality of nearby lakes and rivers. For developing countries, the implications of the experience of industrialised countries are clear. Even rich countries manage to treat only a part of their sewage, e.g. only 52 per cent of sewage is treated in France and only 66 per cent in Canada. As in the USA, Japan and France, most countries have provided some form of environmental grants to municipalities in order to achieve their present levels of treatment. Given the very low initial levels in developing countries (e.g. only about 2 per cent of wastewater was treated in Latin America at the beginning of the decade) and the vital importance of improving the quality of the aquatic environment, an approach is needed that simultaneously makes the best use of available resources and provides incentives to polluters to reduce the loads they impose on surface and groundwaters. An effluent tax is one form of incentive that is used in many countries, ranging from France, Germany and The Netherlands to China and Mexico. It can be applied to any dischargers, cities or industries, with two benefits; it induces waste reduction and treatment and can provide a source of revenue for financing wastewater treatment investments (see Chapter 6). The dramatic impact of the Dutch effluent tax on industrial discharges is described by Jansen (1991). The results given in Table 7.2 show that overall industrial effluent loads decreased by two-thirds between 1969, when an effluent tax was first applied, and 1985 (falling from 33 million to 11 million population equivalents). The experience of China in the application of an industrial effluent tax for financing industrial wastewater management improvements has been described by Suzhen (1995). In France and Mexico, the effluent tax is applied equally to municipal and industrial effluents, thus encouraging local investment in municipal wastewater treatment plants. An effluent tax, however, should be used in combination with municipal sewer use charges in order to ensure that industries do not escape paying for their discharges by passing the cost on to the municipality, as well as to ensure that the municipal sewerage authority has sufficient revenues to build and to operate sewerage and treatment works. Box 7.3 Water resource financing through river basin agencies in Germany and France The Ruhrverband The Ruhr Basin, which has a population of about five million, contains the densest agglomeration of industrial and housing estates in Germany. The Ruhrverband is a self-governing public body which has managed water in the Ruhr Basin for 80 years. There are 985 users and polluters of water (including communities, districts, and trade and industrial enterprises) who are "Associates" of the Ruhrverband. The highest decision-making body of the Ruhrverband is the assembly of associates, which has the fundamental task of setting the budget (of about US$ 400 million annually), fixing standards and deciding on the charges to be levied on users and polluters. The Ruhrverband itself is responsible for the "trunk infrastructure" (the design, construction and operation of reservoirs and waste treatment facilities), while communities are responsible for the "feeder infrastructure" (the collection of wastewater). The French River Basin Financing Agencies In the 1950s it became evident that France needed a new water resources management structure capable of managing the emerging problems of water quality and quantity successfully. The French modelled their system closely on the principles of the Ruhrverband, but applied these principles on a national basis. Each of the six river basins in France is governed by a Basin Committee, also known as a "Water Parliament", which comprises between 60 and 110 persons who represent all stakeholders, i.e. national, regional and local government, industrial and agricultural interests and citizens. The Basin Committee is supported by a technical and financial Basin Agency. The fundamental technical tasks of the Basin Agency are to determine how any particular level of financial resources should be spent (e.g. where treatment plants should be located and what level of treatment should be undertaken) so that environmental benefits are maximised, and what degree of environmental quality any particular level of financial resources can "buy". On the basis of this information, the Water Parliament decides on the desirable combination of costs and environmental quality for their (basin) society, and how this will be financed, relying heavily on charges levied on users and polluters. The fundamental financial task of the Basin Agency is to administer the collection and distribution of these revenues. In the French system, in contrast to the Ruhrverband, most of the resources that are collected are passed back to municipalities and industries for investments in the agreed-upon water and wastewater management facilities. Source: Briscoe and Garn, 1994 Table 7.2 Impact of the effluent tax system introduced in the Netherlands on pollution loads (106 population equivalents) 1969 1975 1980 1985 Domestic discharges 12.5 13.3 14.3 14.5 Industrial discharges 33.0 19.7 13.7 11.3 Total discharges 45.5 33.0 28.0 25.8 Removed by wastewater treatment plants Remaining pollution 5.5 8.7 12.6 14.5 40.0 24.3 15.4 11.3 Source: Jansen (1991) 7.3.3 Community participation The aspiration of most urban households, including the urban poor, is to have access to cost-effective and affordable sanitation services via public or private utilities. Consequently, they would be willing to participate, as responsible users, by paying the appropriate service charges. In the cities of many developing countries, however, such services are not yet universally accessible and poor communities must, themselves, get involved in the planning and delivery of sanitation and sewerage options. The examples of the condominial sewer system in Brazil and the Orangi Pilot Project indicate an important institutional approach to community participation in which a productive partnership is formed between community groups and the municipal government or the utility. Often, such a system involves public provision of the external or trunk infrastructure, which may be operated by either the public or private sector, and the community providing and managing the internal or feeder infrastructure. The link between feeder and trunk infrastructure is essential for the evacuation and disposal of human waste collected by the community, but it is too easily overlooked. Many forms of community participation are possible for the provision of sanitation and sewerage services, such as: • Information gathering on community conditions, needs and impact assessments. • Articulation of, and advocacy for, local preferences and priorities. • Consultations concerning programmes, projects and policies. • Involvement in the selection and design of interventions. • Contribution of "sweat equity" or management of project implementation. • Information dissemination. • Monitoring and evaluation of interventions. Promoting and enabling community participation can take many forms. Where political will exists, governments may promote participation and create the conditions under which communities and households, as well as NGOs and the private sector, can play their appropriate roles. The World Bank-financed PROSANEAR project in Brazil (Box 7.4), for example, provides a framework and the resources for municipalities and utilities to experiment with innovative technical and institutional arrangements for providing sanitation services to the urban poor. When such government support is absent, alternative approaches have commonly been used to stimulate community involvement and to build the necessary political will. First, NGOs or community-based organisations (CBOs) often play a catalytic role in mobilising communities and forming partnerships. In one of the largest scale examples involving an NGO, Sulabh Shauchalaya International began, in 1970, promoting the construction of pour-flush latrines in Delhi and other Indian cities, and over a period of 20 years assisted in building over 660,000 private latrines and 2,500 public toilet complexes with community participation and government support (NIUA, 1990). Second, consultations and town meetings are increasingly used as a forum to discuss and agree on environmental priorities, and to propose participatory solutions (Bartone et al., 1994). Finally, communities may engage in public protests or legal actions as a means of building a constituency of the urban poor, and applying pressure on local governments and utilities for dialogue and action. The Orangi Pilot Project (see section 7.2.3) had its origins in the discontent of local residents with excreta and wastewater overflowing in the streets as a result of the failure of the Karachi Development Authority to provide adequate sewerage (Hasan, 1995). Box 7.4 The PROSANEAR Project in Brazil The World Bank, in collaboration with the Brazilian Government, has financed the PROSANEAR project as a means of addressing the complex issues of water and sanitation service provision in low income neighbourhoods. The project tests technical and institutional solutions in these favelas, without any pre-established "plan" in terms of service levels, delivery systems and targets. About US$ 100 million of investments are providing water and sanitation infrastructure to about 800,000 favela residents in 11 cities, using a radically different approach compared with other projects. State water and sewerage companies are encouraged to try out flexible, adaptive and participatory project designs, so that projects are based on what the poor residents want and are willing to pay for. The PROSANEAR project, which reached its peak implementation period during 1992-95, provided convincing evidence of the advantages of following a participatory and flexible approach. At the very least the per capita investment costs have averaged about one half the investment cost "ceilings" of US$ 140 for sewerage that the state water and sewerage companies were allowed by the project loan agreements. These dramatic reductions in costs can be attributed to several factors: • Sub-projects were encouraged to build upon localised, but significant, Brazilian experiences of the past two decades with intermediate technical Solutions. • State companies were required by project rules to consult with CBOs (such as church groups, resident associations and women's' groups) at every stage, from design to construction. • Participation was further re-enforced by requiring the state companies to award project design consultancies to consortia of engineering companies and companies or NGOs specialising in community participation, rather than just to the former. • Project design consultants and state water company engineers were actively supervised by the national project management team (in Caixa Economica Federal), so that proposals on service levels, technology, construction schedules, cost recovery arrangements, billing and other details were finalised only after active negotiations with communities. • Close supervision of bidding documents ensured that construction contracts were competitive and that construction companies were fully accountable to local communities. An interesting feature of the PROSANEAR project has been that diverse institutional routes were taken to finalise sub-project designs. At the risk of oversimplification, three models can be identified. One class of "community organisation" models worked out project designs in consultation with leaders of existing community organisations, and then the details with actual beneficiaries. A second class of "direct consultations" models, reached agreement directly between design engineers and affected beneficiaries, with community leaders and organisations retaining a consultative role. In both models, conflicts of interests between the state company and CBOs were resolved through negotiations. The project design consultants functioned as facilitators, with community meetings serving as a type of market surrogate institution. In the third class of "pedagogic" models, training in participatory methods and hygiene education were advocated as the means of raising awareness and building up the ability of the poor communities to confront the established powers and special interest groups. Source: World Bank, 1994a; Project Supervision Reports 7.3.4 A role for the private sector Financial resources can also be mobilised through the private sector; poor service provision by the public sector often suggests a need for increasing partnerships with the private sector. Private sector participation, however, is only one possible opportunity; it is not a panacea. In situations in which existing sanitation service delivery is either too costly or inadequate, private sector participation should be examined as a means of enhancing efficiency and lowering costs, and of expanding the resources available for service delivery. In deciding whether to involve the private sector, it is important to assess several key factors which have been summarised by the Infrastructure for Development: World Development Report, 1994 (World Bank, 1994a). Introducing competition is the most important step in creating conditions for greater efficiency by both private and public operators; some services can be split into separate operations to help create contestable markets. The principle of accountability to the public should be maintained through transparent contractual agreements that are open to public scrutiny and should help to minimise risks to public welfare, create real competition, ensure efficiency, and promote self-financing. Paradoxically, public sector capacity may have to be strengthened in order to achieve effective private sector participation which requires public sector agencies with sufficient capacity to prepare bidding documents and performance indicators, assess proposed outputs and costs, administer the contracting process, and regulate contract performance. In Mexico, municipalities are granting concessions to the private sector to build and operate wastewater treatment plants, both as a means of financing investments in plants through the private sector and to overcome problems with weak local operating capacity. The Puerto Vallarta wastewater treatment plant was the first of many new plants to come on line in the past few years (Martin, 1995). An important point to remember in cases such as Puerto Vallarta is that the private sector performs the necessary function of mobilising financing for needed investments, but the investments made together with operations, maintenance and depreciation costs will all have to be recovered through tariffs charged to domestic and industrial customers. Another innovative example is a concession to 26 industries in the Vallejo area of Mexico City to form a new enterprise, Aguas Industriales del Vallejo, to rehabilitate and expand with its own funds an old municipal wastewater treatment plant, treat up to 200 l s-1 of sewage, and sell the treated water to shareholders at 75 per cent of the public utility water tariff (IFC, 1992). Box 7.5 The Strategic Sanitation Plan for Kumasi, Ghana Kumasi has had 3 master plans in the last 40 years but still has no comprehensive sewerage system. Meanwhile, sanitary conditions continue to deteriorate as the population grows. The residents of Kumasi already pay about US$ 1 million a year to have only 10 per cent of their waste removed from their immediate environment. The current system of human waste management in Kumasi is inadequate; most of the waste removed from public and bucket latrines ends up in nearby streams and in vacant lots within the city limits, creating an environment prone to the spread of disease. With increasing rapid urbanisation and competition for limited resources, there is the fear that the already poor sanitary conditions will worsen if no urgent and rational actions are taken. In response to the inadequate sanitation conditions prevailing in the city, the Kumasi Metropolitan Area Waste Management Unit, with the assistance of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)/World Bank Regional Water and Sanitation Group for West Africa, prepared a Strategic Sanitation Plan (SSP). The SSP reflects the willingness of the Kumasi Metropolitan Assembly to take the institutional and financial actions needed to ensure delivery of affordable sanitation services to all segments of the population by the year 2000. The plan differs from a traditional master plan in that it: • Tailors recommended technical options to each type of housing in the city. • Considers user preferences and willingness-to-pay. • Uses a relatively short planning horizon (10-15 years), emphasising actions that can be taken now. • Breaks the overall plan into projects that can be implemented independently but which together provide full coverage. The SSP moves away from reliance on conventional sewerage alone and considers a range of proven technologies that address the needs of all segments of the urban population, recognising resource constraints, and pays due attention to the willingness and capacity of users to pay for improved services. The strategic planning process being used in Kumasi is dynamic and the SSP itself will evolve as experience is gained. This iterative process began with a pilot project funded by UNDP in which the various technical, institutional and financial issues that are proposed in the SSP are being evaluated and refined. The pilot project is, in fact, the first phase of city-wide implementation to be supported by a World Bank-financed project. Source: Whittington et al., 1992; KMA, 1993 7.4 Strategic planning and policies for sustainable sanitation services Applying a strategic planning approach to urban sanitation problems should result in choosing the right policy instruments, agreeing priorities, selecting appropriate standards for service provision, and developing strategic investment and cost recovery programmes. The question of appropriate service standards is a particularly vexing one that, in the end, should be answered by considering user preferences and willingness-topay. In a large city with many pockets of poverty, service standards are likely to be spatially differentiated because many households cannot afford conventional sewerage without massive government subsidies. The Kumasi Strategic Sanitation Plan (Box 7.5) provides an example of a differentiated plan matching housing types, income levels and user preference; the plan recommends that sewers be used in tenement areas, latrines in the indigenous areas, and flush toilet/septic tank systems in high income and new government areas. Willingness-to-pay surveys were carried out (Whittington et al., 1992), and the results were used to help define differentiated financing options. Explicit subsidies were targeted to the city's low-income population. Municipal wastewater treatment is a particularly costly and long-term undertaking so that sound strategic planning and policies for treatment are of special importance. The recently endorsed Environmental Action Programme for Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), formulated with the assistance of the World Bank (1994b), recognises that the CEE countries will require a plan to move towards Western European standards over a period of 15-25 years as financial resources become available. Although urban sewerage levels in the CEE are generally adequate, 40 per cent of the population are not, at present, served by wastewater treatment plants. The domestic pollution load represents 60-80 per cent of the combined municipal and industrial organic waste load in many CEE cities. Furthermore, many of the existing plants are currently overloaded, poorly operated and maintained, or bypassed. The following is a checklist of policy questions posed in the CEE Action Programme to be answered before proceeding with municipal waste-water investments: • Have measures been taken to reduce domestic and industrial water consumption? • Has industrial wastewater been pre-treated? • Is it possible to reuse or recycle wastewater? • Can the proposed investment be analysed in a river basin context? If so, have the merits of the investment been compared with the benefits from different kinds of investments in other parts of the river basin? (Note that a least-cost solution to achieve improved water quality may involve different, or no, treatment at different locations.) • Has the most cost-effective treatment option been used to achieve the desired ambient water quality? • Has there been an economic analysis to assess the benefits (in terms of ambient water quality) that could be achieved by phasing investments over 10 years or more? 7.4.1 Cost-effective technologies Developing country cities are beginning to recognise that poor urban residents cannot afford, nor do they necessarily want or need, costly conventional sewerage. Beyond the dense urban centres, the average household cost of conventional sewerage may range from US$ 300-1,000. This is clearly too expensive for many households with annual incomes well below US$ 300. Fortunately, a broad range of cost-effective technological options are available to respond to the demands of urban consumers beyond the urban centre, with the potential to reduce costs to the order of US$ 100 per household. The UNDP/World Bank, Water and Sanitation Program has worked with many countries over the past decade to develop, demonstrate, document and replicate many of these lowcost sanitation options. The examples drawn upon throughout this chapter illustrate many of the options available to households (e.g. ventilated improved pit (VIP) latrines in Lesotho, Sulabh pour-flush latrines in India, condominial sewers in Brazil and simplified sewerage in Pakistan), as well as the supporting institutional and financial systems that make possible the wide-scale application of these options. Wastewater treatment technologies also have a wide range of costs. Conventional treatment processes may cost US$ 0.25-0.50 per cubic metre (Figure 7.6). If nonconventional options can be used, it may be possible to cut these costs by at least onehalf. Promising low-cost treatment approaches, especially for small and intermediate cities, range from natural treatment systems (such as waste stabilisation ponds, engineered wetlands systems and even ocean outfalls), to decentralised treatment systems (such as are used in Curitiba, Brazil), to new treatment processes (for example anaerobic treatment processes such as the upflow anaerobic sludge blanket (UASB) reactors presently operating in cities in India, Colombia and Brazil). In large cities, land or other constraints may result in conventional treatment being the most cost-effective approach for achieving the desired water quality objectives, although this should always be a decision resulting from an economic analysis. Lifetime costing should always be used to compare and to choose among treatment options, because operations and maintenance constitute a major share of the costs. Figure 7.6 The costs of conventional sewage treatment (After National Research Council, 1993) 7.4.2 Conservation and reuse of scarce resources Cornerstone ecological principles for sustainable cities include the conservation of resources and the minimisation and recycling of wastes. Translating these principles into urban policies for wastewater management should emphasise the strategic importance of water conservation and wastewater reclamation and reuse in cities. Successful conservation and reuse policies, moreover, need to achieve a balance between ecological, public health and economic and financial concerns. Pricing and demand management are important instruments for encouraging efficient domestic and industrial water-use practices and for reducing wastewater volumes and loads. Water and sewerage fees can induce urban organisations to adopt water-saving technologies, including water recycling and reuse systems, and to minimise or eliminate waste products that would otherwise end up in the effluent stream. In addition to pricebased incentives, demand management programmes should include educational and technical components, such as water conservation campaigns, advice to consumers, and promotion, distribution or sale of water-saving devices like "six-litre" toilets which use less than half the volume of water per flush than a standard toilet (World Bank, 1993b). Wastewater reclamation and reuse is increasingly recognised as a water resources management and environmental protection strategy, especially in arid and semi-arid regions (see Chapter 4). The use of reclaimed urban waste-water for non-potable purposes, such as in-city landscape irrigation and industry or for peri-urban agriculture and aquaculture, offers a new and reliable resource that can be substituted for existing freshwater sources. Water pollution control efforts can make available treated effluents that can be an economical source of water supply when compared with the increasing expense of developing new sources of water (e.g. Asano, 1994). Conversely, in developing countries only recently embarking on major wastewater treatment investments, reuse has the potential to reduce the cost to municipalities of wastewater disposal. A framework for the economic and financial analysis of reuse projects has been provided by Khouri et al. (1994) in a planning guide that integrates economic, environmental and health concerns with agronomic concerns for the sound management of crops, soil and water. 7.5 Conclusions This chapter has identified a number of financial and related challenges facing cities, and countries, as they seek to meet the growing demand of the urban population for sanitation and sewerage services, and for improved wastewater management. First, cities need to complete the "old agenda" of extending sanitation services to the entire urban population. It is clear that the bulk of the finance for this can, and should, come from users. Achieving this requires provision of the services that people want and are willing to pay for. To assist poor urban households in meeting their sanitation needs, innovative credit mechanisms will also be required. Institutional arrangements should be founded on the principle of shared responsibility, with the devolution of decision-making to the lowest appropriate level; service delivery institutions should be responsive and accountable to users. In many cases, this will involve local partnerships to ensure effective community participation in service delivery and financing, and a greater role for the private sector in mobilising investment resources. On the technical side, cities should consider strategic sanitation planning in order to match service options to user incomes and preferences, and they should adopt cost-effective technologies to deliver the desired services. Second, developing country cities are being called upon to embark on the "new agenda" of wastewater treatment and water quality management while still dealing with the "old agenda". This represents an enormous financial challenge, as has been illustrated by the recent experience of the industrialised countries. Difficult choices are being forced on national and local authorities about the level of investment to make in preserving the aquatic environment, about who should pay, and about how to spend available resources. Resource limitations and difficult trade-offs in developing countries reinforce the need to make strategic choices that simultaneously make the best use of available resources and provide incentives to dischargers to reduce their pollution loads, such as using economic instruments like water pricing and pollution taxes. New institutional arrangements are needed, such as river basin associations, that enable stakeholder participation in making the difficult decisions about environmental quality, financing and the allocation of responsibilities for action. Ideally, such arrangements should respect the principle of non-interference in the functioning of municipalities while creating the enabling conditions for them to act as good environmental citizens, for example through financially self-sufficient water and sewerage utilities. New planning approaches are also needed, such as the adoption of strategic planning and policies that establish long-term environmental goals, that identify critical immediate actions and that determine sustainable means of implementation. Finally, greater reliance on conservation and reuse in wastewater management also depends on pricing and demand management. The challenges are great, but the evidence shows that they are not insurmountable. 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