Ann Thomas Sanitation, Hygiene, Institutional WASH Team Lead
UNICEF, USA
Ann provides strategic direction and oversight of UNICEF’s global portfolio on sanitation, hygiene and institutional WASH. She is a Canadian environmental engineer and a founding member and co-lead of the Climate Resilient Sanitation Coalition.
Articles written by Ann Thomas
Nature Calls – why sanitation is the logical starting point for fighting climate change
466 11. June 2024
In September 2021, Hurricane Ida dropped more than six inches of rain on New York City in a matter of hours. Roughly half of that rainfall, 3.15 inches, fell within the first hour—nearly twice the rate the city’s infrastructure was designed to handle.
At 11am that day, I got a call from my daughter’s school in the outskirts of the NYC metropolitan area asking me to collect my daughter ASAP. The school basement was filling with water … fast. By the end of the day, the school was shuttered, and the surrounding community evacuated. Meanwhile, outside my front door in suburban New York, neighbours were piling the contents of their basements onto the sidewalk. ‘The neighbourhood’s shit is in my basement!’ one exclaimed. Social media was filled with discordant images of flooded streets and Teslas floating through them.
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