From access to resilience
The premise of the launch is that the water and sanitation sector has been measuring the wrong thing, or at least only half of it. Counting how many people have a connection says nothing about whether the connection survives a drought, a flood, a conflict or a currency crisis. UNICEF’s new index, released in beta, is an attempt to make the second question answerable.
Kamal Kishore of UNDRR made the case for why the sector is the right place to start: water and sanitation failures do not stay contained.
What the index measures
The GWSRI is risk-based and aligned to the Sendai Framework. It scores countries across hazard exposure, vulnerability across ecosystems, infrastructure and communities, service performance, and, decisively, governance. UNICEF validated it by correlation against external datasets, including the EU INFORM risk index and UNICEF’s own Children’s Climate Risk Index, and found that countries with robust, well-governed systems show materially lower risk.
The governance finding is the one worth dwelling on, because it cuts against the sector’s instinct to treat resilience as an engineering budget line.
The financing arithmetic behind the launch is stark. Kouassi-Komlan put the sector’s annual requirement at more than $114 billion, against a rate of new access that would need to multiply many times over to close the gap on schedule. His argument was that spending on resilience is cheaper than repeatedly rebuilding, and that the sector has to move from reacting to crises toward preventing them.
The counting angle
For a project about measurement, the most quotable line of the session came from the Secretary General of the Environment Agency in Abu Dhabi, and it doubles as the rationale for the whole exercise.
The claim to watch is whether a beta index changes any budget. Sanitation and Water for All framed the stake as regression rather than progress, warning that hard-won gains can be washed away without resilient systems, and reframing the post-disaster slogan: the issue is not building back better but building forward better. Kishore was blunter about the test, saying UNDRR would be watching closely to see whether the launch triggers practical action on the ground.
Why it matters for the SDGs
This is SDG 6 (water and sanitation), under in-depth review at this Forum, meeting SDG 13 (climate resilience) and SDG 17 (partnerships and finance). It also completes an argument the Forum opened on day one. The SDG 6 review established that the world is far off track on water; this session argued that the indicator being tracked, access, will overstate progress in a world of recurring shocks. A household counted as served in a year when the system fails is not served. The index is UNICEF’s attempt to make that distinction visible in the statistics.
Watch & read
- UN Web TV, recording of the side event (9 July 2026).
- UN SDG 6 Synthesis Report 2026, the evidence base for the water review. Our brief.
- The opening and the SDG 6 review, HLPF 2026 first meeting.
- UNICEF WASH · Full HLPF 2026 coverage.
Quotations are lightly edited from an automated (Otter.ai) transcript of the UN Web TV recording and should be read as close paraphrase. Speaker names and titles were reconciled against public records where possible; the transcript rendered the index name inconsistently and garbled several panellists’ names, who are therefore cited by role and institution. The index was presented as a beta release.