QUANTITY Vs. QUALITY

This week’s blog will be exploring the relationship between water scarcity and water sanitation. Firstly, we can define water scarcity as “a shortage in the availability of renewable freshwater relative to demand” (Taylor, 2017). With the use of metrics, Falkenmark (1989) defines water scarcity as when annual water supply drops below 1000m3 per person and absolute water scarcity when water supply drops below 500 m3 per person visually represented in Figure 1. Falkenmark water stress index is the most widely used indicator to examine water scarcity. Yet, as Taylor 2009 demonstrates the metric is outdated and described as too simple ultimately failing to take into consideration the use of groundwater supplies, access to water, quality of water, seasonal variability and landscape changes.

Figure 1: Visualisation on the different levels of Water Scarcity
 Source: Falkenmark (1989) 

The aspect of water quality failed to be distinguished through the Falkenmark water stress index will be the focus. As such, we can define good quality water as water that contains low microbial content and free from any fetal or chemical substances - ideal for human consumption and domestic usage (Llyod and Helmer, 1991). This link between water scarcity and sanitation discussed by Taylor 2017 illustrates that people that lack access to sanitation are not affected by water scarcity in a physical sense but a quality and access sense. Figure 2 is a regression graph of African countries in 2014 access to safe water and annual per capita water availability. The results demonstrate no correlation between the two factors. Therefore, concluding you can be water secure and still suffer from a lack of safe water due to water quality.

Figure 2: Graph  to show the relationship between access to safe water and per capita freshwater availability
Source: Taylor (2017) 

 An article which can make sense of these findings is by Thompson et al. (2000), who looked at water usage among low-income urban dwellers in East Africa. Thompson's findings revealed that unpiped households resulted in lower levels of hygiene and lower levels of water usage demonstrated in Figure 3. Many households in rural East Africa who did not have access to a piped water system had to travel a distance to an unprotected source which further increased their chances to health risks related to poor water quality. This supports the idea that although an area can have a sufficient supply to water, water quality and access to clean water plays a pivotal role in the usage of water concluding that water quantity is more important than water quality. 

Figure 3: Per Capita Water Used by Type (Litres per day)
Source: Thompson et al. (2000)