Wastewater and sanitation covers the collection and treatment of wastewater and faecal sludge, including treatment plants, sewer networks, pumping stations and public sanitation facilities.
The Capability Development Index tracks the events that move a capability — operational use, technical breakthroughs, procurement decisions and the industrial base behind them — and places each on the record with the date it happened.
Recent developments cover the current period. Historical developments are the inflection points that produced Wastewater & Sanitation as it stands today.
Settlements of the Indus Valley Civilization in Asia developed organised water supply and drainage infrastructure. This is cited as one of the earliest examples of urban sanitation provision.
Rome's early sewer system used stone and wooden drains to collect and remove wastewater from populated areas. The approach conveyed raw sewage to a natural water body where it would be diluted, establishing a model of urban drainage that persisted for millennia.
The JMP 2015 report recorded substantial reductions in open defecation over the MDG period, though 946 million people still practised it. By 2015, 82% of the urban and 51% of the rural population used improved sanitation facilities.
The UK development agency set out a working definition of sanitation for programme design. It contributed to the formal vocabulary used by donors in the sector.
Through the Millennium Summit in New York in 2000 and the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002, the UN set goals for poverty eradication and sustainable development. The sanitation target aimed to halve by 2015 the number of people without access to potable water and sanitation relative to a 1990 baseline.
Monitoring showed a large gap between target coverage and reality. The finding drove international attention to the lagging sanitation agenda.
The declaration responded to slow progress towards the MDG sanitation target. It was intended to raise political attention and investment in sanitation globally.
The resolution established sanitation as a matter of rights rather than merely service delivery. It reframed national obligations around access to safely managed sanitation.
The initiative funded research into safer and more effective ways to treat human waste. It sought technologies suited to settings without sewer networks.
The portfolio update set out the foundation's water, sanitation and hygiene priorities. It also funded India's Sanitation Capacity Building platform from 2015 to 2022 to help towns plan decentralised sanitation solutions.
The estimate put non-sewered sanitation systems at 4.7% of global anthropogenic methane emissions, comparable to emissions from wastewater treatment plants. It linked sanitation infrastructure choices to climate outcomes.
The study assessed the whole sanitation value chain rather than individual facilities in developing cities. It informed cost comparisons between sewered and decentralised approaches.
The ladder ranks service levels from open defecation through unimproved, limited and basic to safely managed. It created a common measurement framework for comparing sanitation capability across countries.
SDG 6 set a target of clean water and sanitation for all by 2030, broadening the ambition beyond the MDG halving target. Sanitation thereby became a standalone global development priority.