Introduction
A recent report from the UN Institute for Water, Environment and Health announced we have entered an age of ‘water bankruptcy’. The language of ‘crisis’ and ‘stress’ is no longer adequate to describe the situation, instead we are in a “post-crisis failure state” where “baselines can no longer be restored”. Our water pollution and consumption levels have outpaced renewable inflows and safe depletion thresholds. The world will begin to feel the consequences of “living beyond its hydrological means”, as rivers fail to meet the sea, lakes shrink and disappear, aquifers are pumped to the point of salt intrusion and dry forests are set ablaze.
Importantly, the burden of this bankruptcy falls disproportionately. It is those who are the most vulnerable and the least culpable left to pay the price: low-income households, people of colour, women, and young people. After examining how this burden is shared, we will also explore how it was created and the mechanisms by which it is shifted onto the disadvantaged.
Low-income Households
According to UN Water, income is a relatively reliable indicator of who lacks safe, reliable and affordable water as water scarcity generally follows poverty. All across the world, poor households are less likely to have piped water, are at higher risk of contamination exposure, and have the weakest political influence to change these conditions. In the event of price hikes, water may become a regressive levy on poorer households who can do nothing but accept water taking up larger and larger portions of their wages.
In low-income countries, billions of citizens already lack safely managed water services. There is an overwhelming reliance on surface water, informal vendors, unprotected wells and communal standpipes. The contestability of the informal water market means citizens are left paying more for worse quality water – vendors benefit from no economies of scale and there is no industry oversight to enforce safety standards. This leads to rapid disease transmission and longer collection times, both having adverse impacts on health and well-being. For those unconcerned with humanitarianism, this also poses serious economic threats: worsening an already fraught water situation will reduce the amount of economically active and productive citizens, perhaps fostering downturn and recession as inactivity increasingly entrenched in the age of ‘bankruptcy’.
In terms of livelihoods, water bankruptcy will impact smallholder agricultural operations, fishmongers and informal industries – which all rely on dependable hydrological sources. These low-income occupations are generally held by poorer people who are unlikely to have fallback savings if their jobs are eradicated by water insolvency and unlikely to have an arsenal of alternative employable skills in the event of downturns.
The threat of water bankruptcy faces rich and poor countries alike. In wealthier nations, the problem is unequal access due to socio-economic disparities between classes. In countries developed enough to have bureaucratised utilities industries, people unable to afford expensive water will face shut-offs for non-payment. Poorer people in richer countries also lack the knowledge of alternative, natural means to substitute formal water suppliers. Where people with limited access in developing nations may have the skills to purify water from natural sources, to identify water holes and to observe animals in order to find water, the First World may find themselves stunted by lifetimes of guaranteed access.
Those in rural areas may suffer due to ageing infrastructure, poor maintenance, slow repairs and frequent service interruption. Existing issues of corroding pipes and faulty plumbing will only be exacerbated when the supply of water is tightened. Conversely, densely populated urban areas may become ‘water deserts’, as the higher possibility of non-payment can lead to their being de-prioritised.
People of Colour
Environmental racism refers to the disproportionate exposure of racially marginalised communities to environmental hazards, pollution, and toxic facilities; leading to higher rates of disease, injury and fatality among these groups. In the case of water bankruptcy, inhabitants of nations in the Global South will bear the majority of the burden. In many such countries, colonially-drawn borders and colonially-implemented weak, divisive institutions mean that conflict and instability have already limited water safety and accessibility. For example, in Jakarta, the water architecture of slums is inherited from prior Dutch ‘involvement’, and is described as an ‘elite archipelago’ which ignores the needs of impoverished natives and prevents ‘water justice’ from being delivered. In these kinds of circumstances, we can see how race and class intersect with water bankruptcy; dermatologically darker countries get less water, and leftover colonial legacies, legal/caste systems and inadequate infrastructure then concentrate meagre water inflows among the upper classes. In Bangladesh, WASH finds that minority groups have limited water access due to entrenched structural caste discrimination.
In the developed world, these racial disparities in water access still persist. Historical mechanisms like redlining (blocking BAME homeownership via insurance discrimination) have serious contemporary ramifications: less ownership has caused infrastructural underinvestment, poor maintenance, worse environmental protections and higher failure rates. Communities of colour are more likely to endure regulatory violations and lower water quality. There have been boil-before-use warnings for years in First Nations Canadian communities, and a continued lack of piped water in parts of the Navajo nation. These groups are not the priority of policymakers, so will be the first to suffer when water bankruptcy begins to show its face in the West. Stretched resources, urban over-crowding and insufficient provision systems will have an undoubtedly worse impact on these already disadvantaged groups. If the Jackson, Mississippi water crisis was able to occur pre-bankruptcy, one can only imagine the strife that awaits. Income cannot protect these groups, either; Bullard (1990) finds racial disparities in water access and quality persist even when incomes increase.
Women
In 2020, the Tikri border in India was home to a year-long protest in response to agricultural acts passed by Parliament, which would leave farmers at the mercy of corporations. Women perform the majority of India’s agricultural labour, and joined the protests in fear that the Farm Bills would hand their insecure groundwater supplies over to corporate monopolies. Women bear the primary burden of water scarcity in India and across the rest of the world – women and girls aged fifteen plus are responsible for water collection in around 80% of water insecure households. Water bankruptcy will amplify this inequality in reproductive labour, and lead to women doing even more for even less (water) in return.
Water collection is survival labour, and its increase leads to time poverty. Women who have to traverse longer distances for water, and carry more at a time for fear that their current water source won’t be there next week, have less time for education and employment. This exacerbates dependency and reliance on men in their households, as more and more men become sole earners again while women are consumed with unpaid survival tasks. This stunts female development, reproduces social immobility and poverty, and further entrenches gender divisions. Girls are nearly twice as likely as their brothers to fetch water, so water bankruptcy will cement these disparities intergenerationally. As the climate warms and natural disasters increase and intensify, women, households’ primary carers, will face even more difficulty in the absence of safe water for injury treatment.
Water bankruptcy also poses unique health threats for women. Before 1993, women were rarely included in clinical trials. Contemporarily, this has manifested a profound lack of medical knowledge on women’s biology compared to men’s. The absence of clean water will only exacerbate this gap when women’s menstrual hygiene needs can no longer be met, when pregnancy and childbirth risks skyrocket, and when infection vulnerability becomes more prevalent. We are likely to see an increase in maternal mortality rates, not only because women’s health isn’t a general medical priority but also because we have less knowledge of how to safely deliver children without the sterile tools we depend upon. Yet again, developed nations have an added risk of complacency as we are many generations removed from widespread natural home birthing practices. For developing nations, there is also the adverse health impact of carrying more water over longer distances. An ethnographic SAPIENS study found this caused miscarriage, uterus prolapse and premature labour.
Developed nations also present an interesting intersection of race and gender in the case of water bankruptcy; while there have been legal steps made toward race and gender equality, women of colour in wealthier nations still face ‘misogynoir’. Black women in the UK are around 2.7 times more likely to die during pregnancy (or up to six weeks postpartum) than their white counterparts. This is often attributed to enduring myths of black female pain tolerance from slavery and to underlying racial biases among medical personnel. As clean water (and sterile equipment) become scarcer in hospitals located in densely-populated urban areas (which often house many people of colour), we could expect a noticeable increase in this mortality phenomenon – as those at the bottom of the maternity pecking order are made to face longer waits, less care, and worse resources.
Nearly one in three women and girls will experience physical or sexual violence in their lifetime. More than fifty thousand women and girls are murdered by partners and close relatives per year. Gender-based violence is a global endemic. Long journeys to remote water sources increase the time that women spend unprotected and vulnerable (as they’re carrying precious cargo), thus exposing them to harassment and assault. Water bankruptcy can also have disastrous effects on gender relations in the home: SAPIENS anthropologists observed Indonesian women discussing how water shortages had triggered disagreements and domestic violence. Their analysis has shown women in water insecure households are more than twice as likely to report domestic violence. Terrifyingly, the developing nations most likely to suffer the bankruptcy first are often the ones with more cultural barriers towards reporting domestic violence. UN Water suggests that the Middle East & North Africa, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa are the regions that will feel the brunt of the bankruptcy, these are also regions with entrenched social and structural barriers to gender equality, meaning a water-driven increase in domestic violence will not necessarily be met with adequate concern from policymakers.
Even for the most misogynistic of political observers, who care little for women’s equality and wellbeing, this predicted increase in time poverty and mortality should be an economic concern. Expanding women’s unpaid labour in the home reduces their potential for workforce participation, significantly decreasing the productive potential of half of the population. Under-education and unemployment mean human capital is not being properly developed or utilised, thus already-struggling smallholder industries in developing nations will become reliant on a shrunken, male workforce who cannot access the water their operations require. Women’s voices are consistently ignored in water planning and infrastructural development, meaning gendered needs are ignored and a feedback loop of exclusion is created; for the economy, this is a feedback loop of underutilised human resources which will only become more extreme as water bankruptcy takes hold.
Youth
Adults may, to some extent, be able to navigate this drastic hydrological shift. Legal autonomy, employment and relative freedom mean that adults can alter their water practices or move locations. For children (complete dependents), water bankruptcy poses a serious developmental threat. UNICEF expects that one in four of the world’s children will be exposed to high water scarcity by 2040.
Children are biologically vulnerable to water scarcity in ways adults are not. Weaker immune systems put them at greater risk of disease contraction, and less clean water inevitably worsens the spread of illnesses like dysentery, typhoid and polio. These all require clean and accessible water to be tackled, and their first victims are often children. Disease contraction, as well as the simple inability to access clean water for cooking and drinking, in the early stages of childhood can lead to long-term developmental problems, stunted growth and cognitive impairment. Returning to the perspective of the ruthless economist, widespread developmental issues lead to younger generations unable to match the productive output of those who came before. Lost or degraded human capital leads to economic contraction.
Moreover, water bankruptcy may have serious consequences for education. A lack of clean accessible water in schools leads to inadequate sanitation and, again, the spread of disease among both students and teachers. Poor sanitation conditions can reduce attendance, concentration and learning outcomes, as well as reducing the amount of willing (a dirty school is a pedagogically unattractive one) and able (a dirty school leads to teacher illness) teachers. Over time, children may begin to lose vital skills and abilities as the capacity of schools is limited by poor sanitation. For developing nations already struggling with education, water bankruptcy could quickly undo decades of careful and deliberate educational progress. Further, at a household level, children are often made to collect water, care for ill relatives and work to compensate for lost income. As water collection takes longer, natural disasters injure relatives with more frequency and parents lose smallholder occupations due to water scarcity, children may begin to experience the same time poverty (thus limited education and development) as their mothers and sisters.
Looking to the future, today’s youth are to inherit degraded and insufficient systems. They also face the longest exposure to worsening conditions, having grown up in the state of bankruptcy. This means the youth may innovate low-level adaptations instead of solutions, seeking to alleviate (rather than fundamentally change) a condition of scarcity they have grown up with. Young people also lack political power; this may be the product of age alone, or also the product of youth and lower socio-economic status in combination (those impacted worst by water bankruptcy are generally both poorer and darker). This paucity of political influence means youth-specific concerns may not be taken into account in future policy and infrastructural planning.
Perpetrators
The UN’s report stresses that historical patterns of benefit and burden, in the case of water over-use, should inform who bears the costs of adjustment. When examining the contemporary phenomenon of bankruptcy, then, it is important to discern who are the driving benefactors of over-extraction.
Firstly, we have fossil fuel producers. These are a relatively small group of corporate giants who account for a massive share of global emissions. These corporations are responsible for intensified droughts, increased evaporation, exacerbated glacier loss and cemented hydrological instability. State-owned oil and gas companies (e.g. Saudi Aramco; the largest singular corporate pollution emitter, and Gazprom) and investor-owned fossil-fueled utilities companies (e.g. ExxonMobil and Shell) account for much of this consumption and pollution – especially due to the water needed for chemical and refinery processes. On a larger scale, these firms’ activities lead to reduced precipitation, snowpack decline (which starves rivers), weather variability and aquifer recharge disruption.
Secondly, we have industrial agricultural activity – the largest global water consumer, accounting for around 70% of global freshwater withdrawals. The main uses of water for these companies are irrigated monocultures (e.g. rice, cotton, sugar, almond), livestock production and maintenance, and export-oriented agribusiness. Notably, much industrial agriculture takes place (and crowds out local smallholder businesses) in developing countries, who generally earn little tax revenue from involved companies and must foot the bill for corporate water over-use and soil degradation. Large-scale agricultural operations lead to groundwater depletion, river diversion, soil salinisation and, in the long-run, ecosystem collapse. For the ruthless economist, the dominance of these kinds of activities in the economy can lead to primary commodity export dependency. As water becomes more scarce and operations are forced to either scale back or reduce product quality, recession becomes a highly likely outcome since economic health is dependent on agricultural exports alone, rather than a diverse range of products.
These industries are by no means the only polluters and over-consumers of water, and another driving factor is the growing population of citizens across the globe. However, these are two of the biggest contributors to water bankruptcy who, as detailed in the following section, are not the ones paying the ever-increasing price.
Shifting the Burden
The companies behind water bankruptcy do not shoulder the burden of their activities. Instead, through various mechanisms, they are able to externalise the costs of their pollution and consumption. The burden is shifted, as we have seen, onto society’s most vulnerable: low-earners, people of colour, women and children.
Lots of these hydrologically-damaging activities take place in the Global South, where less developed nations tend to have weaker government structures and less effective regulatory practices. Following (arguably flawed) neoliberal thinking, these governments often pursue economic liberalisation policies, reducing corporation taxes, labour market oversight and environmental restrictions to appear more business and FDI friendly. Lacklustre laws mean corporations can consume and pollute without hindrance, and domestic taxpayers are forced to clean up behind them. In the developed world, corporations engage in intense lobbying and campaign funding to ensure their interests are not opposed. In the UK for example, weak lobbying regulation means corporations can exercise unmitigated influence over policymakers. Moreover, the ‘revolving door’ between government, regulators and corporate lobbyists allows many people to use their government contacts and savvy when in corporate roles. Further, hiring industry ‘experts’ as environmental regulators runs the sizable risk of regulators being ‘captured’ by their own vested (often financial) interests in the industry’s, not the environment’s, well-being.
Large corporations engaged in pollution and over-extraction of water also have the financial resources to avoid legal liability for their wrongdoing. Hiring the best accountants, lawyers and compliance experts means financial culpability for environmental damage can always be minimised. Corporations can use bankruptcy protections and complex subcontracting chains to ensure burden avoidance. Moreover, long legal battles cannot be fought by local disadvantaged communities, so any environmental litigation will favour corporate interests since they have the financial power to purchase legal success. Again, cleanup falls to the taxpayer.
Hazardous facilities that contaminate local water supplies are also often placed near marginalised communities without the ability to oppose the intrusion. These are often seen as ‘sacrifice zones’ by corporations and regulators due to lower land value, weaker property rights and less local capacity for political resistance due to disenfranchisement. In the long-run, as property values plummet further as a result of corporate environmental damage, residents become trapped in ecologically inhospitable, hydrologically-drained areas because there is little resale value or demand for their homes.
Often, corporations do not even disclose the environmental risks of their activities. Asymmetries of knowledge and differential access to information mean corporations can essentially lie by omission without punishment. Corporations have access to superior intelligence regarding environmental threats, and are able to employ expert assessors of risk while locals likely lack the time to comb through the relevant details. Moreover, complex technical reporting and risk assessments often cannot be properly understood by laypeople. Firms may also fund favourable research regarding environmental and water use/pollution risks, which then allows them to misrepresent data and possible threats when dealing with local communities.
Conclusion
Water bankruptcy is not merely a failure of natural systems, or a temporary period of scarcity, but a redistribution of environmental costs from powerful economic actors to socially marginalised populations. Bankruptcy is no co-incidence or mistake, it is the result of entrenched inequalities of influence. The victims and perpetrators in the age of water bankruptcy are the same as every other observable global hierarchy: women, ethnic minorities, low-income households and children suffer for the benefit of corporate interests.
