Experts React: What Else Is Needed to Address Global Water Insecurity?

Audio Brief

A short, spoken-word summary from CSIS’s Caitlin Welsh on her commentary with Franck Gbaguidi, Tanvi Nagpal, Rod Schoonover, and Sera Young, "What Else is Needed to Address Global Water Insecurity?"

This week, CSIS is launching the Project on Water Security, which will provide a permanent home for CSIS analysis on the rising threats of water insecurity to U.S. geopolitical and economic interests, with a special focus on the relationship between global food security and global water security. The Project on Water Security is part of the newly rebranded CSIS Global Food and Water Security Program.

The threats to water security are as diverse as the uses for water itself. Here, CSIS experts examine various challenges facing global water security, demonstrating the highly complex, deeply interconnected, and precariously positioned systems that populations and industries around the world rely on. Increased communication and coherence, not just between the water sector and others like food and energy, but within the water security sector itself, is urgently needed to address the challenges of providing safe, reliable, and affordable water to those who need it most.

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From Crisis to Risk Management

Franck Gbaguidi
Senior Associate (Non-resident), Global Food and Water Security Program

This year is predicted to be record-breaking for water scarcity. With the global population having recently surpassed 8 billion, it is projected that about two-thirds of the world will suffer from water shortages by 2025. This alarming situation will lead to a rise in water-related conflicts, some of which already induced extreme measures, such as deploying water police units. Failing to address this crisis will also result in severe consequences for agriculture and industry, exacerbating food shortages, jeopardizing the livelihoods of farmers, and causing disruptions in global supply chains.

Challenges will vary by region: China's hydropower generation will be affected, Europe's fluvial transport will be disrupted, and tensions among states in the American Southwest will escalate as water scarcity becomes the new normal in the Colorado River Basin. Adding to the severity, climate change is exacerbating the crisis by depleting resources and acting as a threat multiplier, especially in the Middle East and Africa. Despite this, policymakers often overlook or inadequately respond to the problem of water scarcity, not recognizing it as a systemic crisis.

To tackle water scarcity, a shift from emergency measures to carefully planned policy efforts is essential. The current ratio between short-term crisis management and long-term risk management must be reversed. This entails designing and implementing multiyear water plans with specific targets, akin to how energy or climate policy plans are now being developed. These efforts should be concentrated in three areas:

1. Water System Efficiency: Policymakers should prioritize overlooked yet critical solutions, such as water metering to better inform policy decision making, leakage repair to prevent significant water loss, and infrastructure upgrades to avoid large-scale contamination and pollution.
2. Water Technology: A substantial increase in public and private investments is needed to mainstream rainwater harvesting, install industrial wastewater treatment systems, and ramp up greywater reuse to reduce the impact on water at local levels.
3. Water Sobriety: A mindset shift is required to recognize water as a scarce resource, particularly from agricultural and industrial actors. A functioning system of checks and balances among governments, investors, civil society organizations, and leaders from water-intensive industries is critical to ensuring progress.

Only by combining efforts from all three angles will the world effectively turn the tide on water scarcity.
 

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Supporting Utilities and Customers at the Same Time

Tanvi Nagpal
Senior Associate (Non-resident), Global Food and Water Security Program

One of the greatest challenges to global and domestic household water security is shoring up long-term political and economic support to ensure that everyone can afford safe, reliable water and sanitation services. This requires a fundamental shift in how we think about financing services beyond water bills that are insufficient to cover rising provision costs.

In Ghana, for example, the national water and wastewater service provider has struggled to meet the government’s mandate of universal coverage. Almost 85 percent of the urban population lacks access to safe sanitation services, and less than 30 percent have safely managed water. Rural areas are even worse off. 

And Ghana is not alone. In many low- or middle-income countries (LMIC), water bills—tariffs and charges—often fail to cover basic operating costs, let alone the costs of expanding access to meet demands. Household bills are kept low for the reason of affordability, but a recent study found that almost 60 percent of the subsidies intended for the poorest, actually benefit richer households. Irrespective of how they are funded, chronically under-resourced service providers cannot invest in operational improvements, thereby compromising the very infrastructure they rely on.

Affordability is not only a challenge for LMICs, however. Positioning equity as an underlying principle of service provision is a challenge everywhere. In the United States, a 2022 report by Dig Deep found that 1.4 million people in live without indoor plumbing and 17 percent of households in rural areas report lacking access to safe water. These systemic inequities sometimes manifest catastrophic failures. The broken pumps that led to raw sewage in Mississippi’s waterways, and the lead pipes that poisoned water in Flint, both highlighted how some communities, because of racism and poverty, could not afford even the most basic services.

Given the scope, severity, and urgency of affordability challenges, governments everywhere must simultaneously support utilities and the customers they serve. In Ghana, a World Bank project is combining infrastructure loans with grants to service providers to reduce costs and improve efficiency, while specifically targeting households that previously lacked a public connection. In the United States, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal presents a historic opportunity, setting aside $50 billion to invest in safe water infrastructure and requiring that at least 40 percent of the funds go to communities that could least afford to make these investments in the past.

So far so good, but the United States still needs a long-term commitment to equity in service delivery. This is the only way to make sure that the investments made today will be maintained and provide services to even those who are least able to afford them.
 

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A Matter of Quality, Not Only Quantity

Rod Schoonover
Senior Associate (Non-resident), Global Food and Water Security Program

While freshwater availability and access are often at the forefront of water security discussions, ecological security is an underappreciated yet escalating threat to global water quality. Core issues threatening water worldwide include nutrient overabundance, harmful algal blooms, industrial contamination from per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), and the biotic effects of climate change.

Nutrient overabundance has emerged as a distinctive global challenge. This issue arises when excess phosphorus and nitrogen compounds infiltrate water bodies through agricultural runoff and wastewater discharge. These excessive nutrients accelerate eutrophication, a process where disproportionate growth of algae and other aquatic flora chokes off crucial resources necessary for other species to thrive, such as oxygen and sunlight. Eutrophication is easily recognizable worldwide as deceptively beautiful bright green mats on the surface of rivers, lakes, and ponds.

Moreover, certain algae species form harmful algal blooms (HABs) that excrete biotoxins detrimental to animal and plant life. In addition to posing a critical public health risk for humans, domestic animals, and livestock, HABs can lead to the collapse of local fisheries, impacting the economy and food security. HABs further contribute to economic losses from tourism and recreation shortfalls and increased water treatment costs.

Manufactured chemicals like PFAS present another set of challenges to freshwater. Renowned for their resistance to grease and water, these “forever chemicals” persist with little degradation in water systems. Moreover, they accumulate and become more concentrated within humans and animals over time, causing adverse health effects such as hormone disruption, immune system damage, and potentially cancer. An unsettling dimension of PFAS water contamination is that governments lack comprehensive knowledge of their distribution, including in the United States and Europe.

Water security analyses frequently account for climate change, but such work typically emphasizes the abiotic effects of climate change on water, which include well-established intensified evaporation rates and unpredictable rainfall patterns. But climate change is also likely to exacerbate biotic threats to water—including to water quality. For example, rising temperatures can amplify eutrophication and algal bloom formation, whereas changes in precipitation can modify nutrient runoff dynamics and influence the dispersal of pollutants like PFAS.

Including these biological elements in the analysis of freshwater systems is essential to understanding and addressing the evolving challenges to water security—including water quality—in the twenty-first century.
 

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A Human Voice in Water Data

Sera L. Young
Senior Associate (Non-resident), Global Food and Water Security Program

A critical piece missing from the toolkit to reduce global water insecurity is data on human experiences with water problems. To fill this gap, the water sector can learn valuable lessons from the food and nutrition sector.

Current water indicators tend to measure that which can be seen, like the physical availability of water (m3/capita) or the drinking water infrastructure that serves a household. However, many people experience water hardships even when they live in water-rich areas or have faucets in their house. To more accurately understand water insecurity, analysts need to know if the water that is “out there” is meeting basic domestic needs.

By analogy, food security was once measured solely using the kinds of physical indicators currently used in the water sector. Food balance sheets could indicate the number of calories available in a country, but they could not indicate which people are able to reliably access them. Understanding of the prevalence, severity, and sequelae of food insecurity was vastly improved when analysts began asking people about their hardships with food. The value of these experiential measures is irrefutable now that the Food Insecurity Experiences Scale is an indicator for Sustainable Development Goal 2.

To bring these missing human voices to the water sector, an interdisciplinary group of researchers and practitioners worked to develop the Water Insecurity Experiences Scales (WISE Scales). They comprise 12 questions that take approximately three minutes to administer and generate prevalence data at both the individual and household levels that are globally comparable. Because people are asked about water for a variety of uses, WISE data are more holistic than other indicators. Further, the individual version of the scale (IWISE) provides a more precise measure of the human experience of water insecurity than regional or even household indicators. Indeed, it is generating some of the first gender-disaggregated data on water insecurity.

The WISE Scale can also tie water to other sectors and myriad outcomes. For example, a 25-country study performed in collaboration with UN Food and Agriculture Organization found that individuals who were water insecure were two to three times more likely to be moderately to severely food insecure, even after controlling for known covariates such as income, age, and education. 

The WISE Scale brings a fresh user-side perspective to the water sector, and the data are highly complementary to existing indicators. Hopefully this “sister” scale to the Food Insecurity Experiences Scale will encourage cross-sectoral dialogue and provide a clearer picture of the water-related hardships that too many people are facing.

Zane Swanson, an associate fellow with the Global Food and Water Security Program, provided valuable editorial support.