Unpacking measurements to water security, equity and use by all

Delivered by: Upward Spiral, SNV Netherlands Development Organisation, International WaterCentre/Griffith University

 

The concept of Water Security is widely used in the Water sector: within rural/urban WASH, Irrigation, Water Resource Management. Within these “sub-sectors”, water security is presented as the overarching ambition by many different organisations, yet there is no uniform way to measure this at the user level. Unlike the global guidance that JMP developed for WASH which can be used across sub-sectors, there is not such equivalent. This means that we cannot evaluate whether there has been progress on water security and even less so, whose water security has been improved and who is lagging behind.

Within this workshop we will be working with the UN definition of water security: “the reliable availability of an acceptable quantity and quality of water for health, livelihoods, ecosystems and production, coupled with an acceptable level of water-related risks”. This means we essentially distinguish 4 dimensions of water security:

1. Water for different uses in quantity, quality, accessibility, and reliability
2. Clean living environment (free from pollution and with good hygiene practices), e.g., pollution from human excreta, waste-water, solid waste, drainage, effluent
3. Water resource security in quantity, quality, reliability
4. Protection from unacceptable water-related hazards and risks

The workshop explores potential measurement of each of these dimensions across 4 sub-sectors: Irrigation, Water Resource Management, Urban WASH and Rural WASH.

Learning or other Objectives:

1. Share a holistic concept and measurement approach to water security
2. Ground the issue of equity into the discussion about water security
3. Initiate a discussion about measurement of water security across different sub-sectors of water.

 

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