What is water security?

According to the UN Water Security & the Global Water Agenda, water security is defined as the “capacity of a population to safeguard sustainable access to adequate quantities of and acceptable quality water for sustaining livelihoods, human well-being, and socio-economic development, for ensuring protection against water-borne pollution and water-related disasters, and for preserving ecosystems in a climate of peace and political stability.” This appears to be quite a robust definition, encompassing a wide variety of conditions to be met. Yet, its subjective nature is still problematic. What is an adequate quantity? Or an acceptable quality? How much water is required for ecosystem preservation?

It is important to understand that water security is not a fixed, rigid concept. Indeed water itself is a complex, dynamic resource (Rijsberman, 2006:6). It is temporally and spatially unreliable, implying that water security cannot be constant. A region may experience heavy rainfall in one period and drought in the next. Violent conflict may break out, making it unsafe to walk the streets and collect water. Thus, ideas of water security are changeable, contingent on a variety of factors both human and physical. This is particularly relevant considering the continuing onset of climate change. 

So, how then can we achieve a definitive answer on what it means be to water secure or indeed water scarce? How can we transmute this qualitative definition into a more tangible, numerical indicator? Earlier this year, Simon Damkjaer and Richard Taylor published a paper on the need for more holistic, meaningful indicators when establishing water policy. They highlight the limitations of the Water Stress Index (WSI) and the Withdrawal to Availability Ratio (WTA) due to their inclusion of mean annual river runoff (MARR). The use of MARR ‘masks seasonality and inter-annual variability in freshwater resources’ (Damkjaer & Taylor, 2017:516). This means that whilst average annual water availability may be high, half of the year could be drought conditions whilst the other experiences flooding. Clearly, neither situation is particularly favourable; yet using MARR in water security calculations may produce a misleading picture of contentment. This is particularly important when considering the tropics, where rainfall is especially seasonal. In addition, MARR does not factor in most of the available groundwater reserves. Again, this gives a misleading picture of water security. Groundwater reserves are widely used across much of sub-Saharan Africa, yet largely ignored in much of water policy, despite huge potential for growth. (Villholth, 2013:374).

To counter this, Damkjaer & Taylor advocate the use of more holistic measures. Indicators such as the Social Water Stress Index (SWSI) and the Water Poverty Index (WPI) engage with socio-economic and political factors to provide a more accurate picture of water scarcity. Indeed, it is logical to assume that even if the UK and say, Chad, experienced 3 months of drought conditions and yielded similarly high WSI levels, the UK would be less likely to experience crisis due to a stronger economic and political system. The UK would likely be in a better situation to import fresh water from abroad for example. It is this ‘adaptive capacity’, which must be integrated into water crisis risk assessments, and considered when developing water policy.

This discussion is continued in my next blog post.

Introduction

As a continent, Africa has the lowest proportion of population with access to safe water and only 38% have access to improved sanitation facilities (UNEP, 2012). Evidently, this has a profound negative impact on human wellbeing. Without a dependable source of clean freshwater human welfare will tend to be inextricably low. Along with obvious problems of dehydration, insufficient freshwater also leaves citizens unable to feed livestock or water crops. Furthermore, water-born diseases, such as Cholera and Typhoid fever, kill an estimated 2 million people every year (WWF, 2017). Water is a fundamental component of a healthy human life, yet an estimated 1.1 billion people still lack freshwater access and 2.7 billion experience water scarcity at least once a year (WWF, 2017).

So, why then are development efforts not solely focused on improving reliable, clean water provision in Africa? Why aren’t millions of water bottles being shipped or – as has been suggested – giant icebergs floated up from Antarctica to solve the continents obvious water shortages?

In reality, things are far more complex. There are a myriad of problems to be faced before adequate water security in Africa is achieved. Perhaps the first is identifying what it actually means to be ‘water secure’ and indeed understanding that water problems in Africa lie not in volume, but rather in distribution (Taylor, 2010). In most areas of the continent, water is ample. Yet, it is difficulties of access and reliability that produce persistent water scarcity.

Throughout this blog, I will be looking at some of the human and physical constraints on water security in Africa with a particular focus on sanitation. As part of this, I will explore the importance of sanitation and how it relates to issues of water security and access. I will then examine current approaches using case studies and wider analysis to develop my own understanding before suggesting how best to proceed. I am particularly interested in how water and sanitation access relates to asymmetries of power at both an individual and national levels.

In my next post, I will look at current policy approaches to water security and indeed how the concept can be suitably measured and understood.