In 2016, 815 million people went hungry but as many or more continued to lack access to sufficient water for cooking, cleaning, or drinking. It is estimated that approximately one out of seven people globally lack access to clean drinking water and two out of seven people lack access to decent sanitation. These challenges also stand to be exacerbated by a changing climate. This amounts to a scenario of tremendous environmental injustice, particularly because in most cases, the people that stand to be most affected by circumstances of water scarcity are those that have contributed the least to the depletion of existing water reserves or to the carbon emissions that will compound existing challenges of water access.

Your reading for this week takes us away from the land by introducing you to the multiple dynamics mediating access to and control over water resources. It also discusses linked livelihoods. As your textbook discusses, factors mediating water access range from the biophysical processes controlling the global water cycle (including evaporation, transpiration, condensation, and precipitation) to the systems of use humans have engineered (canals, irrigation, and dams) to the social conditions and structures shaping the terms of access to clean water (including water privatization, international water conflicts, and processes of industrial or agricultural development within a given watershed). As you read this week’s chapter, try to think about the best points of possible intervention if access to water and water resources is to be improved.

Try also to pay particular attention to discussion within the textbook chapter on the privatization of water resources over the past several decades -- or the shift in managing water as a public good to managing water as a private good, including through the elaboration of for-profit water companies. As your textbook begins to discuss, and as we will continue to think through next week, this shift is not unique to the management of water resources but coincides with a general shift in thinking that suggests free-market economics is the best way for managing resources. Note, this is the same type of logic that has also fueled optimism around Ecosystem Services. What do you see as some of the pros and cons of privatizing a good as essential to basic life as water? Think back to your readings on social construction earlier this semester as well. How might the way we socially construct water resources (i.e. as a human right or as a private good) shape debates over water management?