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The infrastructure of water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) systems in Nepal is highly vulnerable to frequent natural disasters, endangering both socio-economic well-being and public health. This study employs a literature review approach to examine the intricate relationships between WASH systems and natural and human-induced disasters, including landslides, floods, and earthquakes. The results reveal severe consequences, including contaminated water sources, deteriorated sanitary infrastructure, and an increase in illness, disproportionately affecting marginalised populations. This research also sheds light on Nepal's remarkable resilience, showcasing innovative recovery programmes that combine indigenous knowledge with scientific approaches to enhance long-term preparedness. Key strategies include fortifying infrastructure resilience, distributing redundant facilities, enhancing institutional synergies through comprehensive emergency planning, localising capacity building, and incorporating disaster mitigation into land-use policies. Despite its contributions, this study is limited by its reliance on secondary data sources, which may include biases in reporting disaster impacts and resilience strategies. However, future research should aim at incorporating field studies and empirical analysis to enhance the accuracy and applicability of resilience frameworks. Despite these limitations, this study further proposes incorporating WASH resilience into sustainable development paradigms through multi-sectoral collaboration, strategic resource allocation, and ongoing implementation of the best practices. In Nepal, these global insights are particularly critical due to the frequent natural disasters that severely damage its WASH infrastructure, underscoring the need to adopt targeted and innovative strategies to enhance resilience and sustainability.

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  • Water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) infrastructure in Nepal shows high vulnerability to earthquakes, floods, and landslides.

  • Environmental hazards, compounded by poor planning and infrastructure failures, severely impacts WASH services.

  • Integration of multi-sectoral WASH resilience strategies with novel land-use and disaster risk reduction framework to strengthen infrastructure adaptation.

climate adaptation, disaster impact, infrastructure vulnerability, public health risk, resilience, water quality
© 2025 The Authors
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY 4.0), which permits copying, adaptation and redistribution, provided the original work is properly cited (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).