Title: Responding to Water Vulnerabilities at Home and Abroad

Affordability is one of the most subjective measures used by water regulators and utility managers charged with providing household drinking water. In the United States, for example, the Environmental Protection Agency has long recommended that water bills should not exceed 2.5 percent of median household income, while combined water and wastewater services should not exceed 4.5 percent. Such benchmarks have done little to curtail the water affordability challenges in poorer households across urban settings in the United States, where water utilities too are confronting their own fiscal challenges from operations and capital expenditure needs. In cities like Baltimore, Detroit, and Worcester, public water departments are faced with fiscal stresses driven by a range of concerns, including the rise of non-payment of household water bills, declining levels of populations served, reduced receipts from water services, and, most critically, the loss of state support and federally-funded capital investment grants. The US government’s support for water services in Baltimore, for example, now represents less than 1 percent of the city’s infrastructure budget. In response to these pressures, a growing number of cities in the United States have increased their water tariff levels at unprecedented rates, growing in some cases by 40 percent over the past ten years. Others have introduced new charges, shifting funding for stormwater management out of the general budget and into a separate, dedicated stormwater fee on water bills. A number of cities have even turned to draconian processes of shutting off the water supply to households unable to keep up with the increase in water and sewerage rates. The primary response of the public sector to these crises has centered on incentivizing private sector participation in water systems management; for example, the French water giant Suez Environment recently courted Baltimore officials (unsuccessfully), offering to take control of the city’s water system. News reports indicated that the company promised it would keep labor contracts in place and raise water rates minimally. However, such promises, and expectations that private sector involvement will be sufficient to address affordability challenges, have problematic histories in practice.

Across Latin America, some public-private partnerships in infrastructure did produce efficiencies, but precisely at the cost of labor and users. In Chile, the profit margin legally guaranteed to the private utility Aguas Andinas has turned into a perennial legislative debate about rate reforms. Indeed, household water rates and inconsistencies in service quality recently helped precipitate unprecedented social unrest in Chile’s capital, Santiago. In Europe, too, concerns about household-level water affordability have become the centerpiece of recent protests against the commodification of water services and the accompanying fear of new fees and rate hikes in Ireland, Greece, and Portugal. In the case of Europe, however, governments and utilities rarely, if ever, turn to drastic measures like shutting off water supplies in the face of water affordability difficulties. Instead, they have introduced special tariffs and social programming, and in some cases lowered water flow provisions, to ensure basic water services remain in place for all, but especially the most vulnerable populations.

Like affordability, water accessibility challenges are also positioned as a problem faced by households in lower-income countries where economic and industrial growth lag. Again, we see large countries like the United States and regional powers like Brazil, India, and South Africa all facing stiff challenges in ensuring that, first, they achieve universal coverage for drinking water (and sanitation) and, second, that there is enough drinking water to meet basic needs. Two years ago, Cape Town celebrated the delay of total water resource depletion after making aggressive efforts to curtail water usage. These efforts, with the goal of reducing residential use to fifty liters of water per person per day, included everything from removing public sink taps in university restrooms to the introduction of a water-use calculator. However, the positioning of Cape Town’s crisis as one that could be solved by conservation belies the underlining structural issues shaping household water accessibility risks in that country. For thousands of urban residents in Cape Town, as elsewhere, the taps had long been effectively dry, since water was simply unavailable. Cape Town’s diminished reservoirs had been on the city’s radar for quite some time (for example, low rainfalls in 2018 exacerbated the drought that had begun in 2015, and the need to better align the Western Cape’s supply with demand was outlined over a decade earlier). What catapulted Cape Town’s water crisis to the world stage was that relatively well-off residents in more affluent neighborhoods like Mouille Point or Green Point were suddenly facing the same anxieties that lower-income residents in historically under-serviced informal settlements like Barcelona or Khayelitsha had long experienced. The lack of access to clean, safe water in the latter neighborhoods reflects the legacy of apartheid and the shortcomings of approaches that define water accessibility in terms of conservation as opposed to political fairness.

Institutional—and, in particular, regulatory—factors shape the quality and accessibility of water services for urban households as much as the availability of financing and the pervasiveness of conservation efforts. However, institutional drivers especially impact water affordability and accessibility for vulnerable populations, determining, for example, how affordability is defined and programmatically supported, or how basic accessibility levels are set and implemented. This is true for vulnerable households across countries of all income levels.  Yet how to promote reforms that balance affordability and access concerns against economic efficiency needs still often remains unclear. Environmental justice advocates in the global North explain that only certain reforms, focused on water supply, gain favor among progressive—typically white—middle classes in power, usually in the name of environment sustainability. Affordability and accessibility are relatively new terrains in this debate within higher-income contexts, but the institutional drivers that have long shaped the fight for environmental justice in other domains are equally relevant here. Technological innovations and behavioral change can improve efficiencies in urban household water systems, but it is the underlying institutional and governance architecture that can either suppress or aggravate current water affordability and equitable accessibility challenges in middle and high-income cities. The difference in how the public sector responds to water affordability and accessibility in major cities in the North will reveal much about the way basic rights to water (for the urban poor) are addressed and institutionalized.

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Gabriella Y. Carolini is an Associate Professor of Urban Planning and International Development at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).