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.