Finance Climate finance and water and sanitation The centrality of the hydrological transition in climate change adaptation strategies highlights the need for financing to strengthen more resilient safe drinking water and sanitation systems. Finance that aims at reducing emissions, and enhancing sinks of greenhouse gases and aims at reducing vulnerability and maintaining and increasing the resilience of human and ecological systems to negative climate change impacts will become increasingly crucial in adapting the impacts of climate change on the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation. When taking both mitigation and adaptation into account, the water sector received only 3 per cent of climate funding since 2011. Sanitation has been further side-lined in climate funding, often being treated as a sidenote within safe drinking water and sanitation projects. One study estimates that sanitation received only 3 per cent of water supply and sanitation funding. Beyond not reaching the quantity needed to adapt water and sanitation systems to climate change, climate finance also fails to address the range of climate impacts on the human rights to water and sanitation in two main ways. Firstly, climate finance is generally earmarked for specific projects, requiring a level of research and planning whose cost is often unaffordable for groups in vulnerable situations, who are most in need. Secondly, climate finance also tends to favour projects that focus on building new “climate proof” infrastructure, or updating existing infrastructure, to solve specific local problems, rather than nature-based, ecological solutions. Avoiding the commercialization of water The lack of political will to assume the hydrological transition, as a democratic challenge and from a human rights-based approach encourages false solutions based on the commodification and financialization of water, as ways of allegedly better managing water scarcity. However, the truth is that they increase the vulnerability of the most impoverished and aggravate the unsustainability of the aquatic ecosystems, which are the two key factors in understanding the global water crisis. To guarantee the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation, especially those rights of the most impoverished people, communities, and sectors, water cannot be considered as a commodity. It is about developing participatory adaptation strategies with a gender perspective, based on the recovery of the good state of our aquatic ecosystems and on hydrological, territorial, and urban planning that prioritize the protection and fulfilment of human rights at stake. Funding these strategies and protecting them against the volatility and vulnerability of the markets, is part of the human rights obligation of States: as noted by the former Special Rapporteur, Léo Heller, allocating and spending budget that takes into account the entire life-cycle of safe drinking water and sanitation is part of the obligation of States to progressively realize the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation – including budgeting for how these costs may change in the future through the impacts of climate change. 7