Water- sustainability

EE80s - Week 6

Ben Crow

Outline

1. Issues - is there a global water shortage?

2. My research foci

3. Message: social contexts of investment and innovation

4. Sanitation and sustainability

5. Rural safe water

6. Urban challenge

2 Research foci

1. Rural spring protection

2. Slum water supply

3. Cooperation over the River Ganges

3 Main message

• Contexts of innovation & investment– Pumps– Filters– Sanitation

• Innovation responds to historical and social conditions; industrial country innovation may not apply directly to non-industrial world.

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Safe water and the industrial revolution

• What was the relationship between the Industrial Revolution and the achievement of wide access to safe water in the cities of the West?:

1. Innovations, manufacturing lowered the costs of producing and distributing safe water and sanitation

2. Large scale urban demand for healthy work force

3. Ideas - Chadwick sanitary idea (water transport of human waste, piped access to filtered water)

4. Finance – made possible by industrial accumulation with legal, social and financial innovations

5. Social movements and ideas of public health encouraged by rise of collective work, city living

Women and water

• Women do most of the work collecting water - may take several hours per day

• Women’s work collecting water undervalued because: – Work is unpaid (and thus invisible in various ways)– Governments focus primarily on monetized economic activity– Income from cash-oriented work of men gives greater weight to

that work– Gender division of labor dictates women look after the home

• One study showed intergovernmental agency valued women’s water collection time at 50% of unskilled wage rate, poor women valued their time at 100% wage rate.

4 Sanitation and sustainability

• Why do we need water treatment?

• Some that don’t work:– Flying toilets

– Composting toilets

• Some that do – Dug latrines

– Industrial treatment

5 Rural safe water

Modes of access to water in global South

Mode Characteristics

Own land & pump Rights of property

Common property Collective arrangements

Open access Unregulated Š poss. overuse

State backed Government project

Median reduction in diahrroealmorbidity %

1985Review

1991 Review 2004Review

Water and sanitationimprovement

Overall Rigorous

Improved water quality 22 17 15 42

Improved excreta disposal 22 22 36 -

Improved availability ofwater

25 27 20 -

Improved quality andquantity of water

37 16 17 -

Improvements in bothwater and sanitation

- 33 33 -

Hygiene - 33 33 -

Access to waterCOUNTRY

OR AREA

% with piped

water 1990-1996

% < 15min.

walk water

Urban Rural Urban Rural

Egypt 97 69 96 86

Ghana 76 13 80 36

Kenya 87 20 86 31

Nigeria 63 12 74 32

Zimbabwe 97 18 98 42

Brazil 84 25 95 92

Guatamala 70 61 75 78

Bangladesh 37 1 92 87

India 70 19 89 72

Indonesia 37 6 94 64

Few people in rural areas of the global South have access to piped water.

Less than half rural population of most African countries is within 15 minutes walk of a safe water source.

Spring protection Kenya

• Field research by Jessica Roy in contrasting rural communities of western Kenya with and without improved access to water.

Non-protected spring

• Nearby, on the same creek, there is a non-protected spring. Here, the drinking water source is also used for clothes-washing and livestock-watering.

6 Urban challenge

• Large proportion of world’s poor live in slums

• Slums have been neglected

• Formidable social and political obstacles to reform

• Privatization might have helped in some cases - but innovation needed

Bare knuckles technics

• Solar water disinfection (SODIS)

1. Take plastic (PET) bottle

2. Fill with filthy water

3. Place in sun for six hours

4. Drink

Market and NGO technics

• Market - water trucks selling water – Expensive (volatile prices) – Water cartels maintaining

monopoly

• NGO - Kenya Water for Health– Water points (school and

block)– SODIS

Privatization

• Issue - – water as a commodity vs

water as a human right

• Practical question - – Decline of municipal

utilities

– Reasons?

– Sale of utilities to private companies seen as solution

Overview

1. Social and historical contexts of investment and innovation matter - technical fixes problematic

2. Individual technologies (filters, composting toilets) unlikely to work without social innovation

3. Urban challenges substantial - providing safe water, treating effluent