Mapping Sanitation Vulnerability in Jordan

The research assembled datasets from multiple ministries, agencies, and other data providers into a unified GIS geodatabase. The data covered topography, demographics, meteorology, infrastructure, land use and land cover, groundwater, water resources, sanitation services, and wastewater treatment infrastructure.

Because these datasets came from different sources, formats, projections, and spatial standards, a significant part of the work involved organizing them into a common spatial framework before analysis could begin.

This step is easy to overlook, but it is fundamental to spatial decision-making. A vulnerability model is only as useful as the consistency, comparability, and spatial logic of the data beneath it.

The study evaluated ten criteria associated with sanitation vulnerability: existing sanitation services, population density, depth to groundwater, land use and land cover, precipitation, distance to springs, distance to water reservoirs, density of groundwater wells, soil hydraulic conductivity, and distance to wastewater treatment plants.

These indicators connect sanitation provision with both human need and environmental risk. Population density captures the concentration of people requiring service. Existing sanitation identifies where service gaps remain. Groundwater depth, wells, springs, reservoirs, soil conditions, and rainfall introduce questions of environmental vulnerability and contamination risk. Distance to treatment plants adds an infrastructural dimension to prioritization.

The resulting framework therefore treated sanitation need as multidimensional rather than as a single infrastructure variable.

A central challenge in multi-criteria analysis is deciding how much each indicator should matter. The research used the Analytic Hierarchy Process to assign relative weights through structured pairwise comparison.

Experts and stakeholders from academia, the private sector, NGOs, ministries, water and sanitation authorities, and municipalities contributed to the prioritization process. Their judgments were translated into relative weights and then tested for consistency.

Population density received the highest relative weight, followed by existing sanitation and depth to groundwater. Soil hydraulic conductivity received the lowest weight. The calculated consistency ratio was 0.0619, below the commonly accepted AHP threshold of 0.1, indicating that the weighting process was internally consistent.

Each criterion was converted into a spatial indicator layer and normalized according to its assigned weight. GIS tools were then used to combine the weighted layers into a composite Sanitation Hotspot Index.

The model was refined to account for existing sanitation coverage so that areas already fully or partially served would not be represented as equally vulnerable to areas without sanitation networks.

This produced a final spatial index capable of distinguishing different levels of sanitation vulnerability across Jordan.

The final results classified districts and neighborhoods into five vulnerability categories. Areas with the greatest need for sanitation solutions were concentrated largely in the northwestern part of Jordan, with additional vulnerable locations elsewhere in the country.

The study found that high vulnerability was strongly associated with high population density and limited sanitation coverage. The final maps also incorporated environmental and infrastructural indicators so that prioritization was not based on population alone.

At the district level, highly vulnerable areas included districts across Irbid, Mafraq, Ajlun, Jarash, Al Balqa, Zarqa, Amman, Madaba, Karak, Tafileh, Ma'an, and Aqaba, with substantial variation among governorates.

The significance of the work extended beyond publication. The Sanitation Hotspot Index maps and GIS geodatabase were officially handed over to the Water Authority of Jordan and the Ministry of Water and Irrigation.

The research describes the geodatabase as supporting the establishment of sanitation GIS capacity within the Water Authority of Jordan, alongside planned training and updating of the database.

This is an important distinction. The project was not only an academic exercise in spatial modelling. It was developed as a practical decision-support framework intended to help government agencies, planners, donors, and other stakeholders direct sanitation investment toward areas of greatest need.

A national GIS framework for comparing sanitation vulnerability across Jordan A multi-criteria model linking infrastructure gaps with demographic and environmental vulnerability A transparent AHP weighting process informed by experts and stakeholders District-scale and neighborhood-scale sanitation hotspot maps A spatial decision-support tool for prioritizing sanitation investment and donor funding A geodatabase designed for continued institutional use rather than a one-time academic map