TOSSIB project receives £499,993 in funding

Dr Deljana Iossifova has been awarded funding under the Royal Society’s Challenge-led Grants Scheme to lead research on Sustainable Sanitation in India and Brazil (TOSSIB, £499,993 FEC).

The project runs from 2019 to 2022.

TOSSIB (Towards Sustainable Sanitation in India and Brazil) studies sustainability outcomes across different sanitation systems, geographical contexts (India, Brazil) and temporal scales using multiple analytical approaches and state-of-the-art modelling.

Scenario building will support decision-makers in uncovering plausible futures.

The project will enhance our understanding of complex human-environment interactions and sustainability outcomes. It hopes to enable change in addressing multiple Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs):

• reducing inequalities in promoting sustainable sanitation for low-income areas (SDG10, SDG12);
• supporting the development of sanitation infrastructures that are culturally appropriate, more inclusive, economically viable and less wasteful (SDG6, SDG11);
• helping to reduce common health risks associated with the lack of sanitation (SDG3);
• progressing the improvement of living standards for the poor (SDG11).

The project focus is on the watershed region containing Greater Mumbai (India) and on the Rio das Velhas Watershed (Brazil), which is home to Belo Horizonte.

Beyond densely populated urban centres, these watershed regions contain formal and informal communities of different sizes, villages, as well as swaths of sparsely populated agricultural land, forests and mangroves.

The municipalities and communities in these regions face fundamental sanitation challenges (such as the universal collection and treatment of sewage).

They offer unique opportunities to study the entanglement of co-evolving urban, peri-urban and rural systems at varying stages of infrastructural development.