Working Paper
Unaffordable and Undrinkable
Rethinking Urban Water Access in the Global South
This resource identifies action areas for urban leaders to ensure equitable and reliable access to clean and affordable drinking water.
Urban water provision is a social good, but one that will become increasingly difficult for cities and water utilities to provide due to climate change and population growth.
Widely used global data underestimate the urban water crisis, which contributes to ineffective planning and management.
This paper examines urban water access from a global perspective, analyzing data from 15 cities. It explores key action areas for cities to ensure more equitable access to safe, reliable, and affordable water while combatting major trends affecting water access, including population growth, degraded and depleted water sources, and climate change. The paper recommends a public sector-led effort to extend formal piped water networks and support community-led informal settlement upgrading, among other actions. This paper was produced by WRI and provides executive summaries in Chinese, Portuguese and Spanish.
Learn more
How Forests Near and Far Benefit People in Cities
A growing body of research shows that even forests located far away from urban centers provide tremendous benefits in regulating the global climate, water and biodiversity systems that are essential to people’s health and quality of life.
Better Forests, Better Cities
This report evaluates how forests both inside and outside city boundaries benefit cities and their residents, and what actions cities can take to conserve, restore and sustainably manage those forests.
Buenos Aires Hosts UrbanShift's Second City Academy
The three-day workshop brought together 24 Latin American cities to learn about and exchange ideas on developing vibrant, sustainable neighborhoods and promoting urban biodiversity as strategies to create greener and more resilient cities.
UrbanShift Annual Report
UrbanShift's inaugural annual report serves as an inspiring portfolio of the program's first year in action as well as a handbook for our strategy to achieve sustainable, low-carbon growth in more than 23 cities across three continents.
