Water- sustainability

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Water- sustainability

• EE80s - Week 6
• Ben Crow

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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

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2 Research foci

1. Rural spring protection
2. Slum water supply
3. Cooperation over the River Ganges

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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?
• Innovations, manufacturing lowered the costs of
  producing and distributing safe water and
  sanitation
• Large scale urban demand for healthy work force
• Ideas - Chadwick sanitary idea (water transport
  of human waste, piped access to filtered water)
• Finance made possible by industrial
  accumulation with legal, social and financial
  innovations
• Social movements and ideas of public health
  encouraged by rise of collective work, city
  living

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Women and water

• Women do most of the work collecting water - may
  take several hours per day
• Womens 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
  womens water collection time at 50 of unskilled
  wage rate, poor women valued their time at 100
  wage rate.

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4 Sanitation and sustainability

• Why do we need water treatment?
• Some that dont work
• Flying toilets
• Composting toilets
• Some that do
• Dug latrines
• Industrial treatment

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5 Rural safe water
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Modes of access to water in global South
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(No Transcript)
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Access to water
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.
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Spring protection Kenya

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

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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.

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6 Urban challenge

• Large proportion of worlds 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

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Bare knuckles technics

• Solar water disinfection (SODIS)
• Take plastic (PET) bottle
• Fill with filthy water
• Place in sun for six hours
• Drink

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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

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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

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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