Sanitation Criteria: A Comprehensive Review of Existing Sustainability and Resilience Evaluation Criteria for Sanitation Systems

Despite the existence of numerous sanitation assessment frameworks, it remains unclear how to provide and measure sustainable access to sanitation. A systematic literature review was conducted to evaluate and collate sanitation criteria (i.e., indicators) for evaluating the sustainability or resilience of sanitation systems. The identified indicators represented 30 evaluation themes that included triple bottom line sustainability and technical and resilience considerations, but none of the individual articles had included all themes. In particular, resilience themes were not commonly integrated with other themes. Further, many indicators were not measurable, even though most literature articles (85%) applied their indicators; over a third of the identified indicators had vague or absent metrics. These findings highlight several future research needs, such as developing validation processes to help ensure a set of indicators is sufficiently measuring progress toward or away from sanitation sustainability; expanding guidance on, and options for, data collection and analysis procedures, especially for resilience; and supporting future indicator selection processes, for which a database of existing sanitation criteria was created. These all provide opportunities for improving the measurement of environmental and human well-being associated with sanitation access.