Publicaciones de interés

Article highlights ethnographic work in CDMX on water insecurity adaptation strategies, and provides policy recommendations:

"Governments should consider making household costs less onerous and address some of the inequities in current patterns of water management and distribution".

"Governments researching water supply, security and health must consider the coping and storage methods by which households adapt to their water supply to understand inequities in water access and the potential health risks of “making scarcity enough.” Self-reported measures of water insecurity may mask significant variations in water access. Similarly, measures that report water quality at the point of supply might mask inequalities in health risks if certain households are forced to store water for more prolonged periods".

"Policymakers could do more to provision households with enough water beyond the physical grid. This could include subsidizing households’ efforts to make their intermittent water mimic the experience of continuous supply by providing storage tanks, automatic pumps or other household infrastructure"

"To ensure safe drinking water quality, governments should subsidize water treatment at the point of consumption. In intermittent water supply systems, where most households store their water before domestic use, government resources spent making water potable when it arrives to the household are undermined by the need for storage".

Read the news article here

Research investigates the costs of water intermittent systems in Mexican households:

 "By understanding how households bear the monetary and non-monetary costs of intermittency, we can make urban water safer, more sustainable, and more equitable. This study combines results from open-ended household interviews and ethnographic observations about water management (n = 59 households) with a large-N survey (n = 2,595 individuals) to understand how households experienced water scarcity in Mexico City. We found most residents reported satisfaction with the quantity of intermittent water supply but incurred monetary and non-monetary costs to achieve that satisfaction. We document the ways households adapted to scarcity, transforming the intermittent supply they received from the grid by storing, reusing, and conserving water. These adaptations “made scarcity enough,” allowing families to store and preserve sufficient water to meet their needs for water quantity. However, these same adaptations simultaneously burdened households with financial costs, such as expenditures for storage, pumps, and alternative water sources, and non-monetary costs, such as time-intensive labor spent managing water and noticeable deterioration in drinking water quality. Because the scarce public water supply is distributed unequally throughout the city, the financial, labor, and water quality impacts of adapting to scarcity were borne privately, primarily by marginalized households"  

Read the peer-reviewed article here