When a household in an underserved community gets a piped water connection, do the neighbors benefit too? It's a common assumption, but new research from Accra, Ghana, suggests the answer is more complicated than most people think.

In this episode, you'll hear directly from four people involved in the study: Faustina Boachie, Chief Manager of the Low Income Customer Support Department at Ghana Water Limited; Haleemah Qureshi, Senior Research Manager at Aquaya Institute; Frederick Goddard, Senior Research Data Scientist at Aquaya Institute; and Liz Jordan, former Chief of Party of the USAID Urban WASH Project.

Read the full paper in PLOS Water: https://aquaya.org/benefits-of-piped-water-connections-in-accra-ghana/

What does it mean to build “climate resilient” water supply and water resource systems? Answering that question convincingly requires properly understanding the nature of climate hazards and how they might affect water availability. The global climate system is complex: rainfall varies considerably across seasons, across regions, and (especially) across climate cycles (e.g. El Niño / La Niña). Understanding variability and the multiple influences on regional climate is essential to planning for extreme events. Today, teams of scientists from different countries are brought together by UC’s Santa Barbara’s Climate Hazards Center to make reliable drought forecasts for many parts of the world up to 8 months in advance. They do this by using estimated rainfall distributions over the entire planet at high spatial temporal resolution (think one-day or 5-day accumulations at 5 x 5 km grid resolution for the entire planet) going back over four decades and comparing them with robust estimates of sea surface temperatures (which are used to determine the strength climate oscillations like El Niño). In this episode of the REAL-Water podcast, we speak with CHC director Chris Funk about how to generate meaningful climate data products and forecast analysis, and just as importantly, how those resources are already being used to protect livelihoods.

Rural water systems in Africa have room to improve water quality monitoring. However, the most cost-effective approach for microbial water testing remains uncertain. This study, produced by REAL-Water, compared the cost per E. coli test (membrane filtration) of four approaches representing different levels of centralization: (i) one centralized laboratory serving all water systems, (ii) a mobile laboratory serving all systems, (iii) multiple semi-centralized laboratories serving clusters of systems, and (iv) decentralized analysis at each system. Learn more