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Plumbing Poverty: Mapping Hot Spots of Racial and Geographic Inequality in U.S. Household Water Insecurity
Abstract
Household water insecurity is a global threat to human health and development, yet existing metrics lack a systematic consideration of geographic inequality and spatial variation. In this article, we introduce the notion of plumbing poverty as a conceptual and methodological heuristic to examine the intersectional nature of infrastructure, space, and social inequality. Plumbing poverty is understood in a dual sense: first, as a material and infrastructural condition produced by social relations that fundamentally vary through space and, second, as a methodology that operationalizes the spatial exploration of social inequality. Drawing on millions of census records, we strip household water security down to a single vital measure—the presence of complete household plumbing—to assess its spatial and sociodemographic trends. We identify distinct hot spots (geographic clusters of higher than average values) of plumbing poverty, track its social and spatial variance, and expose its fundamentally racialized nature. Our study finds that plumbing poverty is neither spatially nor socially random in the United States. Rather, plumbing incompleteness is spatially clustered in certain regions of the country and is clearly racialized: Living in an American Indian or Alaskan Native, black, or Hispanic household increases the odds of being plumbing poor, and these predictors warp and woof through space. In considering who experiences the slow violence of infrastructural dysfunction, a geography that is simultaneously ignored and unevenly expressed in the United States, we argue that analyses of space and social difference are central to understanding household water insecurity and must be prioritized in the development of cross-comparable metrics and global measurement tools. Key Words: census microdata, hot spot analysis, household water insecurity, infrastructural geographies, IPUMS.
... Climate change, urban-industrial demand, and infrastructure failures all, broadly, affect water insecurity (Boretti and Rosa, 2019;Schewe et al., 2014). Intersecting systems of marginalization further, and unevenly, shape the ability to acquire and benefit from safe and sufficient water (Crow and Sultana, 2002;Deitz and Meehan, 2019;Gerlak et al., 2022;Harris et al., 2017;Harris, 2008;Mitra and Rao, 2019;Sultana, 2009Sultana, , 2020Thompson, 2016;Truelove, 2019). For example, Deitz and Meehan (2019) demonstrate the interplay between settler-colonialism and institutional racism in the United States, variables alone, misrepresent, de-politicize, and "flatten" intersectionality theory. ...
... Intersecting systems of marginalization further, and unevenly, shape the ability to acquire and benefit from safe and sufficient water (Crow and Sultana, 2002;Deitz and Meehan, 2019;Gerlak et al., 2022;Harris et al., 2017;Harris, 2008;Mitra and Rao, 2019;Sultana, 2009Sultana, , 2020Thompson, 2016;Truelove, 2019). For example, Deitz and Meehan (2019) demonstrate the interplay between settler-colonialism and institutional racism in the United States, variables alone, misrepresent, de-politicize, and "flatten" intersectionality theory. Intersectional approaches, Buchanan and Wiklund (2021) stress, must (1) name and connect interlocking systems of oppression to the otherwise reductive group-level differences measured by statistical models; (2) recognize how "insignificant" findings may reflect shortcomings in data collection, assumptions, and model selection 1 (Harris et al., 2017); (3) identify how one's own work may fall short of the ideals of intersectional theory; and (4) advocate for social justice through theory, empirics, and interpretations. ...
... Colonial, racial, gendered, ableist, class, and caste systems of power and their place-based outcomes (re)produce household water insecurities, and associated adverse social, economic, physical, and mental wellbeing outcomes (Crow and Sultana, 2002;Daigle, 2018;Deitz and Meehan, 2019;Dewachter et al., 2018;Duignan et al., 2022;Gerlak et al., 2022;Jepson et al., 2017;Jones et al., 2005;Leder et al., 2017;Loftus, 2014;Lu et al., 2014;Mawani, 2022;Meehan et al., 2020;Méndez-Barrientos et al., 2022;O'Leary, 2019;Radonic and Jacob, 2021;Ranganathan, 2016;Shah et al., 2021;Sultana, 2009Sultana, , 2020Truelove, 2019;Wilson et al., 2021;Wolbring, 2011;Wutich et al., 2022). This section reviews water affordability and insecurity experiences at the intersections of gender and class oppression. ...
Compounding systems of marginalization differentiate and shape water-related risks. Yet, quantitative water security scholarship rarely assesses such risks through intersectionality, a paradigm that conceptualizes and examines racial, gendered, class, and other oppressions as interdependent. Using an intersectionality approach, we analyze the relationships between household head gender and self-reported socio-economic status, and water affordability (proportion of monthly income spent on water) and water insecurity (a composite measure of 11 self-reported experiences) for over 4000 households across 18 low- and middle-income countries in Central and South America, Africa, and Asia. Interaction terms and composite categorical variables were included in regression models, adjusting for putative confounders. Among households with a high socio-economic status, the proportion of monthly income spent on water differed by household head gender. In contrast, greater household water insecurity was associated with lower socio-economic status and did not meaningfully vary by the gender of the household head. We contextualize and interpret these experiences through larger systems of power and privilege. Overall, our results provide evidence of broad intersectional patterns from diverse sites, while indicating that their nature and magnitude depend on local contexts. Through a critical reflection on the study’s value and limitations, including the operationalization of social contexts across different sites, we propose methodological approaches to advance multi-sited and quantitative intersectional research on water affordability and water insecurity. These approaches include developing scale-appropriate models, analyzing complementarities and differences between site-specific and multi-sited data, collecting data on gendered power relations, and measuring the impacts of household water insecurity.
... Although there are theoretical reasons to expect a positive relationship between water infrastructure investment and economic development 3,9 , it remains unclear how this association varies across different populations. Water infrastructure access and quality is well known for being subject to considerable racial bias in the United States [10][11][12][13][14][15][16] . As such, it is imperative that any analysis of the economic benefits of water infrastructure considers racial inequality due to the well-documented patterns of systemic racism in the United States 17 . ...
... We build on a series of recent articles and reports documenting critical water and sanitation concerns in rural communities-ranging from communities with households that lack plumbing to communities chronically in violation of water and sanitation regulatory Article https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-022-00007-y Previous research on water infrastructure in the United States has largely been devoted to exposing the problems of access to water and sanitation, mainly through statistical analysis and often with a focus on urban locales 11,18,27,30 . However, there has been little scholarship focusing on outcomes from improvements in water infrastructure, with even less on rural areas where improvements are sorely needed and resources are increasingly scarce 31 . ...
... Furthermore, we expect that this relationship will be moderated standards 15,[18][19][20] . In addition, work has continued to document the social injustice posed by water hardship-with poor water infrastructure being more common in rural communities, poor communities, communities of colour and communities at the intersections of these dimensions 11,12,15,16 . Although we know where water infrastructure is poor, and how poor water infrastructure is related to social dimensions, knowledge on the relationship between water infrastructure and economic development remains scarce. ...
Here we test the hypothesis that local government spending on water infrastructure is associated with higher levels of economic development, and the hypothesis that this association is unequal between ethnoracial groups. Using data from the State and Local Government Finance Surveys and the US Census Bureau, we estimate a series of county-level spatial econometric models from 1980 to 2015. Our results support our hypotheses, with most beneficial associations taking 8 years to become evident. Furthermore, through the use of interactional models, we show that this effect is ethnically and racially uneven, with the benefits of investment decreasing as counties become more Latino/a and non-Latino/a Indigenous, and either increasing or decreasing as counties become more non-Latino/a Black, dependent on the specific outcome. Our results suggest that continued investment in rural water infrastructure has the potential to have wide-ranging, but possibly uneven, economic benefits for residents. Local government investment in water infrastructure is associated with rural economic development in the United States. Through the use of interactional models, the economic benefits are shown to be ethnically and racially uneven.
... Food insecurity and limited access to healthful food can give individuals no choice but to rely on calorie-dense, carbohydrate-rich, processed foods, which negatively impact blood sugar in the general population [22][23][24] and AI/AN populations alike [25][26][27]. Further, as reflected in the adapted National Institutes of Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD) Research Framework [28], food insecurity is exacerbated in AI/AN communities by contributors to barriers in physical and built environments, such as water insecurity [29,30], stolen ancestral homelands, forced relocation, and environmental pollution, all of which have devastated AI/ANs traditional healthy food practices [10,31]. Further complicating AI/ANs disparate access to healthy food, AI/AN communities often experience barriers to acquiring healthy traditional foods (such as wild game, fish, fresh produce, and nuts) [31], which further worsen food security [11][12][13][14]. ...
... In AI/AN communities, food insecurity is intimately tied to decimation of traditional and cultural practices due to attempted genocide-in addition to disparate rates of poverty, transportation issues, and lack of retail stores selling fresh food [12,13,15,16,81,92]. In these communities food insecurity is exacerbated by water insecurity [29,30], stolen Native land, forced relocation, and environmental pollution, which have devastated their traditional healthy food practices [10,31]. ...
American Indian and Alaska Natives (AI/ANs) are disproportionately impacted by gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM), subsequent type 2 diabetes, and food insecurity. It is prudent to decrease risk of GDM prior to pregnancy to decrease the intergenerational cycle of diabetes in AI/AN communities. The purpose of this project is to describe and examine food insecurity, healthy eating self-efficacy, and healthy eating behaviors among AI/AN females (12-24 years old) as related to GDM risk reduction. Methods included: secondary analysis of healthy eating self-efficacy and behaviors, and household-level food insecurity measures from an randomized controlled trial that tested the effect of engagement in a GDM risk reduction educational intervention on knowledge, behavior, and self-efficacy for GDM risk reduction from baseline to 3-month follow-up. Participants were AI/AN daughters (12-24 years old) and their mothers (N = 149 dyads). Researchers found that more than one-third (38.1%) reported food insecurity. At baseline food insecurity was associated with higher levels of eating vegetables and fruit for the full sample (p = .045) and cohabitating dyads (p = .002). By 3 months healthy eating self-efficacy (p = .048) and limiting snacking between meals (p = .031) improved more in the control group than the intervention group only for cohabitating dyads. For the full sample, the intervention group had increases in times eating vegetables (p = .022) and fruit (p = .015), whereas the control group had declines. In the full sample, food insecurity did not moderate the group by time interaction for self-efficacy for healthy eating (p ≥ .05) but did moderate the group by time interaction for times drinking soda (p = .004) and days eating breakfast (p = .013). For cohabitating dyads, food insecurity did moderate self-efficacy for eating 3 meals a day (p = .024) and days eating breakfast (p = .012). These results suggest food insecurity is an important factor regarding the efficacy of interventions designed to reduce GDM risk and offer unique insight on "upstream causes" of GDM health disparities among AI/AN communities.
... The US also reported that roughly 98% of its housed urban population had access to safely managed sanitation services, with no data provided for hygiene services [3]. However, the literature on household WaSH insecurity suggests it does exist in the US and it disproportionally affects migrant farming communities, Indigenous communities, and low-income urban communities [5,6,[15][16][17][18]. Reports such as the ones provided by the JMP are limited by the data countries share. ...
... To bring WaSH services to unhoused communities, whether be it through mobile or permanent WaSH facilities, or through Housing First programs, fiscal capital investment is needed to construct, operate, and maintain these services over the long term [17,82]. In Los Angeles, the majority of existing WaSH services are provided by the non-profit sector. ...
Background
Access to water and sanitation is a basic human right; however, in many parts of the world, communities experience water, sanitation, and hygiene (WaSH) insecurity. While WaSH insecurity is prevalent in many low and middle-income countries, it is also a problem in high-income countries, like the United States, as is evident in vulnerable populations, including people experiencing homelessness. Limited knowledge exists about the coping strategies unhoused people use to access WaSH services. This study, therefore, examines WaSH access among unhoused communities in Los Angeles, California, a city with the second-highest count of unhoused people across the nation.
Methods
We conducted a cross-sectional study using a snowball sampling technique with 263 unhoused people living in Skid Row, Los Angeles. We calculated frequencies and used multivariable models to describe (1) how unhoused communities cope and gain access to WaSH services in different places, and (2) what individual-level factors contribute to unhoused people’s ability to access WaSH services.
Results
Our findings reveal that access to WaSH services for unhoused communities in Los Angeles is most difficult at night. Reduced access to overnight sanitation resulted in 19% of the sample population using buckets inside their tents and 28% openly defecating in public spaces. Bottled water and public taps are the primary drinking water source, but 6% of the sample reported obtaining water from fire hydrants, and 50% of the population stores water for night use. Unhoused people also had limited access to water and soap for hand hygiene throughout the day, with 17% of the sample relying on hand sanitizer to clean their hands. Shower and laundry access were among the most limited services available, and reduced people’s ability to maintain body hygiene practices and limited employment opportunities. Our regression models suggest that WaSH access is not homogenous among the unhoused. Community differences exist; the odds of having difficulty accessing sanitation services is two times greater for those living outside of Skid Row (Adj OR: 2.52; 95% CI: 1.08–6.37) and three times greater for people who have been unhoused for more than six years compared to people who have been unhoused for less than a year (Adj OR: 3.26; 95% CI: 1.36–8.07).
Conclusion
Overall, this study suggests a need for more permanent, 24-h access to WaSH services for unhoused communities living in Skid Row, including toilets, drinking water, water and soap for hand hygiene, showers, and laundry services.
... The primary causes of water insecurity in otherwise water-secure countries tend to be a lack of plumbing facilities (or older galvanized plumbing materials, which, as they corrode, introduce lead and cadmium to the water flowing through them), homelessness, poor water quality, and water shut-offs. Many of these issues are correlated and tend to stem from poverty (Deitz & Meehan, 2019). ...
... In the United States, thousands of households, particularly racial and ethnic minorities (e.g., American Indian/Alaska Natives, Black people, Hispanics), lack access to plumbing facilities. Deitz and Meehan (2019) introduced the concept of plumbing poverty to investigate infrastructural and social inequality concerning water access. Their findings indicate that plumbing poverty is not randomly distributed in the United States, but is concentrated within certain ethnicities and areas, most commonly those that are historically disenfranchised. ...
A lack of regular access to clean and safe water and sanitation is a persistent problem in many parts of the world. Most water insecurity studies focus on the world's less-industrialized and lower-income countries, where sanitation and water delivery infrastructure may never have existed. However, many individuals in higher-income countries experience invisible water insecurity, wherein specific households or individuals lack access to sanitation and clean water despite the relative wealth of their country. In the United States, invisible water insecurity tends to manifest as a result of homelessness, a lack of plumbing facilities, and water utility shut-offs. Using a water shut-off dataset from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, we investigate the relationship between a suite of demographic variables and the water shut-off rates in different neighborhoods throughout Detroit, Michigan. We find that shut-offs are more common in areas with more Black households that are more impoverished. Our findings indicate that this relationship links to structural disadvantage resulting from a legacy of racism and segregation in the city.
... Drawing on archival information, spatial analysis, and semi-structured interviews, we center the struggle for water justice in California within historical and contemporary municipal-scale processes of infrastructure development and exclusion in the United States. Our analysis further draws from scholarship on water security in the global South (Anand, 2017;Allen et al., 2006;Wamuchiru, 2017) to contribute to the growing scholarship on water insecurity in the global North (Deitz and Meehan, 2019;Jepson and Vandewalle, 2016;Marshall and Mozee, 2022;Meehan et al., 2020;Pulido, 2016;Ranganathan, 2016;Wilson et al., 2021). We document how peripheral communities of color are deemed "nonviable" not only for water provisioning, but as citizen-actors for long-term planning (cf. . ...
... Last, spatial analysis was also conducted, revealing systemic patterns or clusters (i.e. hotspots and coldspots) of racialized resource distribution (Deitz and Meehan, 2019;Pulido, 2000). The approach uses a distance-based proximity analysis, 6 which measures the distance between the location of domestic well-reliant households and nearby Community Water Systems (CWSs). ...
Systemic inequalities, which affect how water is distributed and used, underlie water insecurities in higher-income (global North) countries. We explore the interlinkages between municipal decision-making and infrastructure to understand how urban climate justice can be advanced through engaging with state-like forms of governance. Drawing on archival information, spatial analysis, participant observation, and semi-structured interviews in the underbounded Latinx community of East Porterville, California, we analyze how local actors actively work against municipal-scale processes of infrastructure exclusion and production, within and beyond the state, to facilitate water access and particular notions of citizenship. We argue urban climate justice demands both an understanding of infrastructural marginalization, and attention to the diversity of perspectives, approaches, and solutions preferred by communities.
... Further, in his studies, Kumar (2014Kumar ( , 2015aKumar ( , 2015bKumar ( , 2016Kumar ( , 2017 showed the deprivation of SC and ST communities in access to basic amenities and the gradual surge of deprivation among them in the last two decades. Different international and country-level studies outside India also represented the geographical inequality in the distribution of Water, Sanitation, & Hygiene (WASH) facilities (Pullan et al. 2014;Afifah et al. 2018;Cole et al. 2018;Deitz and Meehan 2019;Wang et al. 2019;Anthonj et al. 2020;Azage, Motbainor, and Nigatu 2020;Hasan and Alam 2020). The disparity among different social, religious, and economic communities and rural-urban areas in accessing WASH in several countries has been evaluated in several studies (Rheinl€ ander et al. 2010;Bain et al. 2014;WHO/ UNICEF 2015;Vyas and Spears 2018;Acey et al. 2019;Deitz and Meehan 2019;Ezbakhe, Gin e-Garriga, and P erez-Foguet 2019;Satur and Lindsay 2020). ...
... Different international and country-level studies outside India also represented the geographical inequality in the distribution of Water, Sanitation, & Hygiene (WASH) facilities (Pullan et al. 2014;Afifah et al. 2018;Cole et al. 2018;Deitz and Meehan 2019;Wang et al. 2019;Anthonj et al. 2020;Azage, Motbainor, and Nigatu 2020;Hasan and Alam 2020). The disparity among different social, religious, and economic communities and rural-urban areas in accessing WASH in several countries has been evaluated in several studies (Rheinl€ ander et al. 2010;Bain et al. 2014;WHO/ UNICEF 2015;Vyas and Spears 2018;Acey et al. 2019;Deitz and Meehan 2019;Ezbakhe, Gin e-Garriga, and P erez-Foguet 2019;Satur and Lindsay 2020). In India, many studies in the literature assessed subnational variation of basic amenities and development-related indicators (Kundu, Bagchi, and Kundu 1999;Kumar 2017;Kundu and Banerjee 2018). ...
Persisting wide inequality among various geographical spaces and social groups is a significant disincentive to India’s healthy socioeconomic growth and human development. Therefore, arranging adequate safe drinking water and sanitation for all (United Nations Sustainable Development Goal [SDG] 6) and reducing inequality among social groups (United Nations SDG 10) by 2030 is a big challenge to one of the most populated and eco-socio-culturally diversified nations. We have tried to map the inequality among social groups and geographical space in accessing improved drinking water and sanitation (IDWS) facilities. Besides, we have classified Indian districts through the quadrant analysis technique, combining these two aspects of inequality (district-level geographical inequality and inequality between Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe [SC/ST] and other groups). This might find inclusive, sustainable strategies, reducing inequality between social groups and geographical space. The study was carried out in about 46 per cent to 60 per cent of districts characterized by lower coverage of various IDWS facilities, with more SC/ST community deprivation in accessing these facilities. Despite having higher coverage of IDWS facilities, nearly 45 per cent to 49 per cent of districts showed a higher deprivation of SC/ST groups in this case. The study’s findings demand more attention and investment to develop IDWS facilities among SC/ST groups and lower-performing districts.
... But, when data are disaggregated and indicators of water access and quality are considered, there are large disparities across regions, race, and income level. For example, people living on American Indian reservations are far more likely to experience plumbing poverty (incomplete connection to hot and cold water, flush toilets, and bathing facilities), a disproportionate number of Black and Hispanic individuals are not connected to piped water, and those with lower incomes are more likely to be serviced by water systems with greater contamination violations (12,13). The Flint water crisis, it seems, was not an anomaly but a poignant manifestation of an issue that is endemic in many American communities. ...
... Previous research has estimated water insecurity in the United States by examining the proportion of households with complete access to piped water (12). The methodology proposed by Rosinger (14) complements existing strategies by capturing other salient aspects of water insecurity, including water trust and use. ...
... For example, Sultana (2021) illustrated that the struggle for water resources is intertwined with everyday emotional realities that produce differentiated use, access, and control outcomes for different individuals and groups. Beyond social differentiation and stratification, geographers and other social scientists have also demonstrated the importance of time in uneven access to resources in the Global South (Rusca et al. 2017;Valdivia 2018;Valle and Godoy 2019;Rosinger et al. 2021), and the Global North (Ranganathan 2016;Deitz and Meehan 2019). Although these studies provide critical insights into the complex interconnections between human bodily experiences and resources, they are often inclined toward the broad socioecological dimensions of embodiment. ...
The linkages between water insecurity and human health have been of long-standing research interest togeographers, especially those studying the human–environment dimensions of health. This article contributesto this scholarship by demonstrating how insecure access to irrigation water produces differentiated bodilyeffects for women. Data for the article come from empirical field work using interviews, focus groupdiscussions, drone-based participatory mapping, and community validation workshops. Grounded in theliterature on embodiment and intersectional feminist political ecology and through the firsthand experiencesof women and their struggles to secure irrigation water, the article makes two main contributions. First, itdemonstrates how drones could be innovatively integrated into qualitative and political ecology field work tobetter understand human–environment interactions. Second, it shows that space and time are critical tounderstanding the differentiated embodied experiences of water insecurity. More specifically, differentirrigators experience different bodily effects depending on where their irrigated fields are located. Comparedto women with plots near irrigation canals, the article shows that those with plots further afield experiencemore debilitating pains in the limbs, waist, and hips as they struggle to secure water. Overall, the article’sfindings highlight how the uneven geographies of access to irrigation water warrant closer attention byscholars studying hydrosocial relations and health.
... 8 Multiple examinations at the national and local scales suggest that incomplete plumbing in the United States is not only a function of local wealth inequalities but also strongly correlated with race and/or ethnicity. 9,10,11,12,13,14 For example, a recent national examination by Mueller and Gasteyer of plumbing access and Safe Drinking Water Act compliance determined that county levels of incomplete plumbing were significantly predicted by the Indigenous proportion of population, income, and poverty level. 15 These findings concur with the national examination of Integrated Public Use Microdata Series data by Deitz and Meehan, who demonstrated that income, homeownership, and race/ethnicity were correlated with incomplete plumbing; that is, numbers of Black, Indigenous, and Hispanic or Latino households without complete plumbing access were higher than expected given representation within the national population. ...
... Inadequate access to water and sanitation is prevalent among communities in the U.S. with higher American Indian and Alaskan Native households 14 . Similar evidence was also presented in 15,16 . ...
This research proposes a data-driven approach to identify possible disparities in a utility’s outage management practices. The approach has been illustrated for an Investor-Owned Utility located in the Midwest region in the U.S. Power outage data for approximately 5 years between March 2017 and January 2022 was collected for 36 ZIP/postal codes located within the utility’s service territory. The collected data was used to calculate the total number of outages, customers affected, and the duration of outages during those 5 years for each ZIP code. Next, each variable was normalized with respect to the population density of the ZIP code. After normalizing, a K-means clustering algorithm was implemented that created five clusters out of those 36 ZIP codes. The difference in the outage parameters was found to be statistically significant. This indicated differential experience with power outages in different ZIP codes. Next, three Generalized Linear Models were developed to test if the presence of critical facilities such as hospitals, 911 centers, and fire stations, as socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of the ZIP codes, can explain their differential experience with the power outage. It was found that the annual duration of outages is lower in the ZIP codes where critical facilities are located. On the other hand, ZIP codes with lower median household income have experienced more power outages, i.e., higher outage counts in those 5 years. Lastly, the ZIP codes with a higher percentage of the White population have experienced more severe outages that have affected more customers.
... Informal vendors have become the primary source of water for many urban poor that lack formal water services (Collignon & Vézina, 2000;Kjellén & McGranahan, 2006). Informality of land, housing, water and sanitation have therefore been increasingly accepted as a mode of urbanism (Roy, 2005) in the global south and also in some parts of the global north (Deitz & Meehan, 2019;Jepson & Brown, 2014;Meehan et al., 2020). ...
... As experiences across colonias vary, this will be of particular importance for colonias that do not have access to public water systems, those that rely on water hauling, and those that face water quality challenges. Therefore, for congressional policymakers in need of data to support proposed investments in water infrastructure to improve local conditions (Deitz et al., 2019), this work provides strong evidence about which colonias should be prioritized. Additionally, this work can assist local policymakers across the four border states in developing policies to fund cross-sector collaborations with different entities (e.g., non-profit and for-profit water organizations) to increase the successful implementation of long-term solutions for water equity in these underserved communities. ...
This paper explores the application of machine learning to enhance our understanding of water accessibility issues in underserved communities called Colonias located along the northern part of the United States - Mexico border. We analyzed more than 2000 such communities using data from the Rural Community Assistance Partnership (RCAP) and applied hierarchical clustering and the adaptive affinity propagation algorithm to automatically group Colonias into clusters with different water access conditions. The Gower distance was introduced to make the algorithm capable of processing complex datasets containing both categorical and numerical attributes. To better understand and explain the clustering results derived from the machine learning process, we further applied a decision tree analysis algorithm to associate the input data with the derived clusters, to identify and rank the importance of factors that characterize different water access conditions in each cluster. Our results complement experts' priority rankings of water infrastructure needs, providing a more in-depth view of the water insecurity challenges that the Colonias suffer from. As an automated and reproducible workflow combining a series of tools, the proposed machine learning pipeline represents an operationalized solution for conducting data-driven analysis to understand water access inequality. This pipeline can be adapted to analyze different datasets and decision scenarios.
... The results show that race and ethnicity are similarly excluded from water insecurity studies. Many of the same articles appear across both Tables 1 and 2. One prominent article argued that US household water insecurity was highly racialized by examining the geographic inequality of "plumbing poverty" (Deitz and Meehan 2019). Finally, as reported in Table 3, we repeated our earlier search with both exact (i.e., "water security") and relaxed terms (i.e., "water AND security"). ...
This Forum article reports on a meta-review of more than 19,000 published works on water security, of which less than 1 percent explicitly focus on race or ethnicity. This is deeply concerning, because it indicates that race and ethnicity—crucial factors that affect the provision of safe, reliable water—continue to be ignored in academic and policy literatures. In response to this finding the Forum calls for building intersectional water security frameworks that recognize how empirical drivers of social and environmental inequality vary both within and across groups. Intersectional frameworks of water security can retain policy focus on the key material concerns regarding access, safety, and the distribution of water-related risks. They can also explicitly incorporate issues of race and ethnicity alongside other vectors of inequality to address key, overlooked concerns of water security.
... Although spatial analysis has been widely applied to the study of water-associated diseases such as cholera (Azman et al., 2018), shigellosis (Tang et al., 2014) and dengue fever (Anders et al., 2015), a limited body of research has demonstrated spatial patterns of water supply and demand at different scales, generally related to infrastructure and demographic factors such as race and class (Cooper-Vince et al., 2018;Habeeb et al., 2023;Kulinkina et al., 2016;Nguyen et al., 2020;Stoler et al., 2012). Similar relationships have been demonstrated with plumbing and sanitation services (Deitz & Meehan, 2019;De Moura & Procopiuck, 2020). ...
Little is known about the micro-scale spatial patterns of household water insecurity and their implications for community water interventions. This cross-sectional study analyses the location data of 250 households surveyed in Arua, Uganda, in August–September 2017 to evaluate correlates and geospatial clustering of household water insecurity, that is, geographical patterns in how water insecurity is experienced. The spatial cluster analysis identified clusters or outliers in every community, though with different spatial patterns. Household water insecurity was positively associated with food insecurity, round-trip fetching time, and water-related conflict within households and with neighbours. The observed spatial heterogeneity provides a new view of how household water insecurity experiences may vary in space and time, and can help practitioners understand the heterogeneity of impact that is often observed in water interventions.
... Counties that are home to American Indian Nations continue to be among the poorest in North America, with higher incidence of chronic conditions such as heart disease and diabetes [43][44][45]. Infrastructure on tribal lands remains under-developed compared to neighboring non-tribal areas [46,47]. ...
Arsenic is a naturally occurring toxicant in groundwater, which increases cancer and cardiovascular disease risk. American Indian populations are disproportionately exposed to arsenic in drinking water. The Strong Heart Water Study (SHWS), through a community-centered approach for intervention development and implementation, delivered an arsenic mitigation program for private well users in American Indian communities. The SHWS program comprised community-led water arsenic testing, point-of-use arsenic filter installation, and a mobile health program to promote sustained filter use and maintenance (i.e., changing the filter cartridge). Half of enrolled households received additional in-person behavior change communication and videos. Our objectives for this study were to assess successes, barriers, and facilitators in the implementation, use, and maintenance of the program among implementers and recipients. We conducted 45 semi-structured interviews with implementers and SHWS program recipients. We analyzed barriers and facilitators using the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research and the Risks, Attitudes, Norms, Abilities, and Self-regulation model. At the implementer level, facilitators included building rapport and trust between implementers and participating households. Barriers included the remoteness of households, coordinating with community plumbers for arsenic filter installation, and difficulty securing a local supplier for replacement filter cartridges. At the recipient level, facilitators included knowledge of the arsenic health risks, perceived effectiveness of the filter, and visual cues to promote habit formation. Barriers included attitudes towards water taste and temperature and inability to procure or install replacement filter cartridges. This study offers insights into the successes and challenges of implementing an arsenic mitigation program tailored to American Indian households, which can inform future programs in partnership with these and potentially similar affected communities. Our study suggests that building credibility and trust between implementers and participants is important for the success of arsenic mitigation programs.
... Inequality is a peculiar characteristic of urban society. There is no equal access to all with regard to the medical facility, education, food, drinking water, even spacious places for maintaining physical distances as well as getting help package provided by the state (Deitz, & Meehan, 2019). It clears that there are different degree and nature of problems to the people living in the different strata of urban society. ...
COVID-19 is a pandemic of an acute respiratory syndrome that emerging in Wuhan, China in December 2019 spread and affected to the various parts of the world in short period of time. This study explores the social, economic and social psychological impact of COVID-19 in people from different professions and family backgrounds of various categories of urban people. Similarly, I used exploratory research design by taking 5 respondents from different backgrounds and occupations purposively for case study. I found that COVID-19 pandemic has made a huge loss to all economic sectors, employer as well as employee. It creates fear, tension, anxiety and depression in the people. Likewise, this pandemic has also brought changes in the sanitary behavior of the urban people. Moreover, people used to maintain social relationship through cell phone, messenger call and telephone rather than direct meeting and gathering. The nature and degree of impact of COVID-19 was different in the sampled respondents except similar changes in sanitary habit.
... Inequality is a peculiar characteristic of urban society. There is no equal access to all with regard to the medical facility, education, food, drinking water, even spacious places for maintaining physical distances as well as getting help package provided by the state (Deitz, & Meehan, 2019). It clears that there are different degree and nature of problems to the people living in the different strata of urban society. ...
Gender based violence was measured based on different questions related to physical violence, emotional violence and sexual violence. The questions were asked to the Bachelor and Masters Level students. Nepal Demographic and Health Survey (NDHS) questionnaires were taken as reference for questionnaire development. This study entitled “Causes and Consequences of Gender Based Violence against College Girls” is based on the study of Bachelor and Masters Level students of Padmakanya Multiple Campus, Kathmandu. The objectives of the study was to identify the causes and consequences of gender based violence of college students. In this study cross-sectional research design was applied. The Study followed the quantitative approach. From this study it was found that about 34.3percent of the respondents were experienced violence in their life time. Out of the total case of the emotional violence, more than one fifth (24.2%) were humiliate in front of others followed by insulted or make feel bad (20.6%)and threaten to hurt or harm by someone (13.6%). Respondents who were experienced physical violence, highest percentage (10.6%) were pushed, shook and throw something on her followed by twist arm or pull hair (6.1%),slapped and punched (4.5%), and kicked, dragged and beaten (3.8%).A few of the respondents have experienced the sexual violence (12.1%). Among them, 6.1 percent of the respondents were physically force to perform any other sexual acts followed by physically forced to have sexual intercourse(4.5%) and threatened to perform sexual acts in any other way (1.5%).
... Affordability concerns are positively correlated with minority status [72]. Water shortages exacerbate water quality impairments 8 [48], which are already more prevalent in minority communities relative to predominantly white communities [74,75]. Minorities tend to be under-represented in political processes [76,77] and therefore see less investment in infrastructure necessary to remedy water such quality and accessibility inequities [78,79]. ...
Socially vulnerable populations in the United States are bearing the highest costs of water scarcity, which is likely to worsen with climate change, population growth, and growing disparities between areas with high demand and the location of available supplies. Prior research showing that socially vulnerable groups are inequitably exposed to some of the worst shortages has focused on singular dimensions of social vulnerability, typically in relatively localized geographies, leaving us with an incomplete understanding of the national scope of the problem. This study combines data on surface water shortages lasting 12 months and with a 50-year return period with the U.S. Center for Disease Control's Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) to spatially identify clusters of high-shortage, high-vulnerability hotspots from 71,195 census tracts across the conterminous United States. We estimate that 5 percent of the population of the lower 48 states -- nearly 15 million people -- lives in high-SVI, high-shortage hotspot areas. We examine the relationship between water shortage volumes and i) SVI, (ii) SVI themes, and (iii) 15 indicators used to construct SVI for the U.S. and within hotspots. We find evidence that water shortages constitute an environmental injustice, as multiple dimensions of social vulnerability are disproportionately exposed to the worst shortages. However, distinct dimensions of vulnerability that are correlated with increasing shortage volumes vary across regions and within hotspots, indicating that water shortage adaptation strategies will have to be tailored to their specific contexts.
... Instead, an N-shaped relationship will be detected, indicating the decreased environmental degradation may rise again if the economy continues to grow 15,40 . Recent studies also report that household water security may vary within highincome countries such as the United States 46,47 . This pattern suggests future household water security DKC research should also include study sites from high-income countries in addition to the low-and middle-income ones as used in this paper. ...
Water security requires not only sufficient availability of and access to safe and acceptable quality for domestic uses, but also fair distribution within and across populations. However, a key research gap remains in understanding water security inequality and its dynamics, which in turn creates an impediment to tracking progress towards sustainable development. Therefore, we analyse the inequality of water security using data from 7603 households across 28 sites in 22 low-and middle-income countries, measured using the Household Water Insecurity Experiences Scale. Here we show an inverted-U shaped relationship between site water security and inequality of household water security. This Kuznets-like curve suggests a process that as water security grows, the inequality of water security first increases then decreases. This research extends the Kuznets curve applications and introduces the Development Kuznets Curve concept. Its practical implications support building water security and achieving more fair, inclusive, and sustainable development.
... Finally, it is likely that WAPYs would be most fruitfully used in contexts where most people do not have safely-managed drinking water, predominantly L&MICs (WHO and UNICEF, 2021). There is plenty of evidence of water insecurity in high-income contexts (Deitz and Meehan, 2019), but the IWISE-4 has not yet been validated in such settings and such work is underway. ...
Domestic water insecurity harms quality of life outcomes beyond health, for example in worry about water availability or anger at disrupted plans. However, these outcomes are excluded from cost-benefit analyses of water supply interventions, which typically measure and value only prevented disease and time savings. In this paper, I propose a means of quantifying the value of being water secure for an individual's quality of life, the water-adjusted person year (WAPY). One WAPY represents a year lived in complete water security. It is inspired by the quality-adjusted life year in health economics, which combines time with a health-related quality of life index. The WAPY combines time using water services with a water-related quality of life (WaterQoL) index, where 0 = completely water insecure and 1 = completely water secure. The index could be derived from an existing four-attribute Water Insecurity Experiences scale, which includes questions such as “how often did you worry that you would not have enough water for all of your needs?”. Other questions concern drinking water, disrupted plans, and handwashing. Responses can be combined in a weighted index based on the relative importance of the four attributes to people. If someone has a WaterQoL index of 0.6, over a 10 year period they would have 6 WAPYs. If a water supply intervention raised WaterQoL to 0.8, they would gain 2 WAPYs over 10 years. The monetary value of WAPYs gained (e.g. in US$) could be estimated by willingness to pay and included in a cost-benefit analysis. Some interventions might result in greater WaterQoL gains than others, or longer-lasting services. Incorporating WAPYs in cost-benefit analyses, alongside prevented disease and time savings, could help identify interventions which provide better water services to more people within a given budget.
... A range of studies in lower-income countries has identified that water insecurity (inadequate access to sufficient safe water to meet all household needs) associates consistently with heightened expression of common mental illness symptoms [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13]. Also, water insecurity is a clear marker of material poverty and is consistently linked to other forms of social, political, or economic marginalization, all of which are themselves associated with negative mental health outcomes [14][15][16][17][18][19][20]. Yet, global mental health interventions are almost always based on psychiatric or psychological views of mental illness [21] and rarely consider material improvements like water security as relevant interventions in support of mental well-being ( [12]; cf. ...
Water insecurity—the lack of access to sufficient, safe water to meet all household needs—is an escalating challenge in all world regions. It is also associated with unfavorable mental health outcomes, like anxiety and depression. Often situated in the context of drought or general water scarcity, connections between water and mental health often manifest out of the unique characteristics of water—as an important economic and household resource, and one managed primarily by women. This article identifies recognized and theorized pathways between water insecurity and common mental health conditions, as mediated by broader socioeconomic systems in which households are embedded. To this end, we synthesize and connect different literature sets, including limited economic studies in a resource insecurity framework and a small but authoritative body of ethnographic literature. Our review identifies multiple proximate candidate pathways connecting water insecurity with mental health outcomes including community conflicts and/or perceived injustice around water sharing and upkeep, agricultural decline and unemployment, food insecurity or distress migration, decreased water intake, non-exposure to blue spaces, and stress around water management. The gendered role of water management is an overlapping theme across pathways, exposing women disproportionately to forms of conflict, violence, and injustice associated with the risk of common mental illness. In general, there are varied forms of marginalization that people experience within water-insecure contexts. Greater engagement between economics and other disciplines can lend additional theoretical pathways to empirically test the water and mental health connections, associated with people’s water insecurity experiences.
... Residents of low-income neighbourhoods are also significantly more likely to live in inadequate housing requiring major repairs. Bad plumbing could mean inadequate access to clean running water, making it difficult for household members to wash their hands and increasing their risk of contracting COVID-19 from surface contamination (Deitz & Meehan, 2019). Low or poor airflow due to inadequate heating, air-conditioning, or ventilation systems may also mean ineffective indoor air circulation and greater difficulty for household members to adhere to stay-at-home policies. ...
The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic underscores the importance of place of residence as a determinant of health. Prior work has primarily examined the relationship between neighbourhoods’ sociodemographic traits and COVID-19 infection rates. Using data from the City of Toronto, Canada, we assess how the built environments of neighbourhoods, in conjunction with their sociodemographic profiles, shape the pattern of spread of COVID-19 in low-, middle-, and high-income neighbourhoods. Our results show that COVID-19 spread faster in neighbourhoods with a higher share of overcrowded households, large commercial areas, and poor walkability. The extent to which neighbourhood walkability is associated with a slower increase in COVID-19 infections varied by neighbourhood income level, with a stronger negative association in low-income neighbourhoods. Net of the share of overcrowded households, population density is associated with a faster increase in COVID-19 infections in low-income neighbourhoods, but slower increase in high-income neighbourhoods. More green space is associated with a slower increase in COVID-19 infections in low-income, but not higher-income, neighbourhoods. Overall, our findings suggest that post-pandemic urban planning efforts cannot adopt a one-size-fits-all policy when reconstructing neighbourhoods in ways that promote health and reduce their vulnerability to infectious diseases. Instead, they should tailor the rebuilding process in ways that address the diverse needs of residents in low-, middle-, and high-income neighbourhoods.
... Instead, an N-shaped relationship will be detected, indicating the decreased environmental degradation may rise again if the economy continues to grow 15,40 . Recent studies also report that household water security may vary within highincome countries such as the United States 46,47 . This pattern suggests future household water security DKC research should also include study sites from high-income countries in addition to the low-and middle-income ones as used in this paper. ...
Water security requires not only sufficient availability of and access to safe and acceptable quality for domestic uses, but also fair distribution within and across populations. However, a key research gap remains in understanding water security inequality and its dynamics, which in turn creates an impediment to tracking progress towards sustainable development. Therefore, we analyse the inequality of water security using data from 7603 households across 28 sites in 22 low- and middle-income countries, measured using the Household Water Insecurity Experiences Scale. Here we show an inverted-U shaped relationship between site water security and inequality of household water security. This Kuznets-like curve suggests a process that as water security grows, the inequality of water security first increases then decreases. This research extends the Kuznets curve applications and introduces the Development Kuznets Curve concept. Its practical implications support building water security and achieving more fair, inclusive, and sustainable development. A new study considering data from 7603 households across 28 sites in 22 low- and middle-income countries show that inequality of household water security follows a Development Kuznets Curve.
... Inequalities in access to resources affect not only who is at greatest risk of infection, developing symptoms or succumbing to the disease, but also who is able to adopt recommendations to slow the spread of the disease. The homeless cannot shelter in place 59 , families in housing without running water cannot wash their hands frequently 60 , people who are detained by a state (for example, in jails, prisons, immigrant detention centres or refugee camps) may lack space to implement physical distancing, people without health insurance may delay or avoid seeking testing or treatment, people who rely on public transportation cannot always avoid large crowds and low-wage workers are often in occupations (for example, service, retail, cleaning, agricultural labour) where remote work is impossible and employers do not offer paid sick leave 61 . Economic disadvantage is also associated with the pre-existing conditions associated with higher morbidity rates once infected, such as compromised immune systems, diabetes, heart disease and chronic lung diseases like asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease 62 . ...
Background:
Tap water distrust and avoidance, indicators of water insecurity, are prevalent in marginalized US populations. As future environmental challenges stress water resources, further understanding of the scope of water insecurity and impact on diet quality is needed, particularly in vulnerable US populations.
Objectives:
To evaluate associations between three potential indicators of water insecurity - 1) perception of tap water safety for drinking, 2) perception of tap water safety for cooking, and 3) tap water avoidance - and dietary quality and beverage intake in lower-income US adults.
Methods:
A cross-sectional, web-based survey was fielded to 1798 lower-income (<250% FPG) US adults. Participants answered questions detailing tap water safety perceptions and avoidance, beverage intake, dietary intake (PDQS-30), and sociodemographic covariates. Sociodemographic differences in drinking water insecurity measures were evaluated using chi-square and Fisher-Freeman-Halton tests. Associations between water insecurity measures and dietary outcomes were assessed using generalized linear models adjusted for sociodemographic covariates, and effect modification by sociodemographic covariates was assessed.
Results:
Over half of adults surveyed experienced some aspect of water insecurity. Measures of water security differed significantly by sociodemographic covariates (Ps<0.05), with higher percentages of women and gender-nonconforming persons, minoritized racial and ethnic groups, lower-income groups, and food insecure adults more likely to report indicators of water insecurity. Presence of any water insecurity was associated with lower diet quality (β=-1.07; 95%CI: -2.11, -0.03; P=0.04), lower tap water intake (Risk Difference [RD]=0.35; 95%CI: 1.28, 2.12; P<0.0001), higher bottled water intake (RD=1.64; 95%CI: 1.28, 2.12; P =0.0001), and higher SSB intake frequency (Frequency Ratio [FR]=1.13; 95%CI: 1.01, 1.27; P =0.03).
Conclusions:
Water insecurity indicators are associated with poorer diet quality and beverage intake in a population of lower-income US adults. Addressing the intersection of water insecurity, food security, environmental impacts and nutrition may help to improve the wellbeing and resiliency of vulnerable populations.
Disparities in access to water, sanitation, and hygiene within high-income countries are common and often occur across racial/ethnic lines. The Arab-Bedouins in Israel, a formerly nomadic ethno-national minority, have experienced displacement, forced sedentarization, and poverty since Israel was founded. Land disputes with the government have led to precarious living arrangements, including unrecognized villages that the government considers illegal. We administered a structured questionnaire in one government-planned, two legally recognized, and two unrecognized Bedouin communities in the Negev (190 households). Only 44% (95% CI 37%, 51%) of households had access to both safely managed drinking water and sanitation; nationally Israel reports over 99% coverage for each. In one unrecognized village, only 15% of households had access to safely managed water and sanitation, comparable to low-income countries. The overall 1-week prevalence of diarrhea in children under 5 years of age was 22% (95% CI 17%, 27%), with substantial variation between communities. These results highlight that universal access to safely managed drinking water and sanitation remains a relevant goal, not only for low- and middle-income countries but for high-income countries. Bedouin communities in the Negev are a prime example, emphasizing that historic gains in global development have not uniformly reached marginalized groups within high-income countries.
Largescale “big” water infrastructure is once again at the forefront of the global developmentalist agenda and is receiving attendant scholarly attention. Given this parallel growth, now is time to take stock of current scholarly contributions and explore opportunities for future research. In this paper, I review recent developments and insights gained from research on big water infrastructure, and water infrastructure studies, generally, to highlight six key threads of current scholarship. These include the production of big water infrastructure as: (1) a temporal process embedded in colonialism and ecological modernization; (2) infused with infrastructural knowledges, practices and subjectivities; (3) a spatial‐geopolitical process; (4) subject to infrastructural and environmental material characteristics and capacities; (5) producing uneven development and enabling accumulation by dispossession; and (6) a contested process of differentiated socio‐material resistance. In reviewing this literature, I argue that these six research strands form key analytic considerations that could be employed by others studying the nexus between water development, political ecological change, and infrastructure. Before concluding, in the final section of the paper I present additional and ongoing future research directions including big water infrastructure as it intersects with socially differentiated human intimacy and embodiment, indigenous and racialized forms of dispossession, and financialization.
Centralized water infrastructure has, over the last century, brought safe and reliable drinking water to much of the world. But climate change, combined with aging and underfunded infrastructure, is increasingly testing the limits of—and reversing gains made by—this approach. To address these growing strains and gaps, we must assess and advance alternatives to centralized water provision and sanitation. The water literature is rife with examples of systems that are neither centralized nor networked, yet meet water needs of local communities in important ways, including: informal and hybrid water systems, decentralized water provision, community‐based water management, small drinking water systems, point‐of‐use treatment, small‐scale water vendors, and packaged water. Our work builds on these literatures by proposing a convergence approach that can integrate and explore the benefits and challenges of modular, adaptive, and decentralized (“MAD”) water provision and sanitation, often foregrounding important advances in engineering technology. We further provide frameworks to evaluate justice, economic feasibility, governance, human health, and environmental sustainability as key parameters of MAD water system performance.
This article is categorized under: Engineering Water > Water, Health, and Sanitation
Human Water > Water Governance
Engineering Water > Sustainable Engineering of Water
This study uses latent transitional analysis to examine the longitudinal association between racial discrimination and academic self-efficacy in teacher–student interactions. Two levels of teacher–student interactions are examined: low-risk, in which students perceive no probability of racial discrimination, and high-risk, in which students perceive probability of racial discrimination. Participants were drawn from the Maryland Adolescent Development in Context Study ( N = 574: 202 White and 372 Black, mean age = 13.64 [ SD = .42]). Findings revealed that students perceiving no racial discrimination, regardless of sociodemographic factors, showed consistently strong positive academic self-efficacy as they transitioned from lower to higher grade levels compared with those perceiving racial discrimination. Accounting for racial discrimination, there were no differences in academic self-efficacy beliefs between Black and White students. Students’ perceived racial discrimination in teacher–student interactions impacted negatively on academic self-efficacy.
Households reliant on unregulated, non‐grid water and sanitation infrastructure, like private wells and septic systems, face water quality and reliability deficiencies and associated negative impacts on human health at greater proportions than households reliant on publicly‐regulated, water and sewage systems. This study uses the 2019 American Housing Survey to produce the first joint, nationally‐representative analysis of household reliance on wells and septics in decades. We find that there are lower proportions of U.S. households off the regulated water grid than other contemporary estimates. We also find that while 9.1% of U.S. households rely on both private well and septics simultaneously, a slightly higher proportion of households rely on only one of these systems, with the companion infrastructure being publicly regulated. Our results show that both private well and septic reliant households are much more likely to be non‐Hispanic White, live in a single family home (a detached or attached one‐family dwelling) or mobile home (a portable habitable structure that was originally fitted with wheels to facilitate movement), and to live outside a metropolitan area than those reliant on publicly regulated service. Yet, surprisingly both private well and septic reliant households do not have lower average incomes than households reliant on regulated systems. These results suggest that federal, state and local financial assistance, technical assistance and educational programs can be better targeted to ensure that in‐need private well and septic reliant households can operate and maintain their essential water and sanitation infrastructure.
Buildings’ built environment has been linked to their occupants’ health. It remains unclear whether those elements that predisposed its residents to poor general health before the two SARS pandemics also put residents at risk of contracting COVID-19 during early outbreaks. Relevant research to uncover the associations is essential, but there lacks a systematic examination of the relative contributions of different elements in one’s built environment and other non-environmental factors, singly or jointly. Hence, the current study developed a deep-learning approach with multiple input channels to capture the hierarchical relationships among an individual’s socioecology’s demographical, medical, behavioral, psychosocial, and built-environment levels. Our findings supported that 1) deep-learning models whose inputs were structured according to the hierarchy of one’s socioecology outperformed plain models with one-layered input in predicting one’s general health outcomes, with the model whose hierarchically structured input layers included one’s built environment performed best; 2) built-environment features were more important to general health compared to features of one’s sociodemographic and their health-related quality of life, behaviors, and service utilization; 3) a composite score representing built-environment features’ statistical importance to general health significantly predicted building-level COVID-19 case counts; and 4) building configurations derived from the expert-augmented learning of granular built-environment features that were of high importance to the general health were also linked to building-level COVID-19 case counts of external samples. Specific built environments put residents at risk for poor general health and COVID-19 infections. Our machine-learning approach can benefit future quantitative research on sick buildings, health surveillance, and housing design.
Highlights
The current modeling approaches for COVID-19 transmission at early spread are limited due to uncertainty and rare events.
Socio-ecological structure (SES) can organize variables from different hierarchies of a total environment.
TensorFlow-based deep learning with recurrent and convolutional neural networks is developed to explain general health with SES-organized variables.
Among SES factors, built environments have a greater association with general health.
Built-environment risks on individual general health associated with early-spread COVID-19 infections in residential buildings.
Racial health disparities are a pervasive feature of modern experience and structural racism is increasingly recognized as a public health crisis. Yet evolutionary medicine has not adequately addressed the racialization of health and disease, particularly the systematic embedding of social biases in biological processes leading to disparate health outcomes delineated by socially-defined race. In contrast to the sheer dominance of medical publications which still assume genetic “race” and omit mention of its social construction, we present an alternative biological framework of racialized health. We explore the unifying evolutionary-ecological principle of niche construction as it offers critical insights on internal and external biological and behavioral feedback processes environments at every level of organization. We Integrate insights of niche construction theory in the context of human evolutionary and social history and phenotype-genotype modification, exposing the extent to which racism is an evolutionary mismatch underlying inequitable disparities in disease. We then apply ecological models of niche exclusion and exploitation to institutional and interpersonal racial constructions of population and individual health, and demonstrate how discriminatory processes of health and harm apply to evolutionarily relevant disease classes and life-history processes in which socially-defined race is poorly understood and evaluated. Ultimately, we call for evolutionary and biomedical scholars to recognize the salience of racism as a pathogenic process biasing health outcomes studied across disciplines and to redress the neglect of focus on research and application related to this crucial issue.
This article explores the regional disparities in water supply coverage in Pakistan in the context of intraregional development patterns. We applied the Gini index, Esteban and Ray index, and Moran’s I to measure regional development patterns in terms of inequality, polarization, and spatial concentration and build an integrated framework combining them with other widely accepted factors to understand regional differences in water coverage quantitatively. Our results show that improved water (tap and pump water) is more widely supplied in Pakistan with lower inequality but higher spatial concentration than tap water supply coverage, although the patterns differ by urban–rural divisions and provinces. Western regions with smaller populations tend to have higher tap water coverage, and eastern regions with large populations are more covered by improved water. The regression models show various mechanisms of improved water and tap water coverage. Both are related to local economic conditions but tap water coverage is more related to local environmental conditions, and improved water is more related to local demographic conditions. Strong and dense population centers decrease improved water coverage but promote tap water coverage. Urban planners and policymakers should address polycentric regional development to fulfill various development targets and improve regional equity of drinking water coverage in terms of accessibility, availability, and quality.
Tap water's availability, accessibility, and biological safety do not automatically translate into social acceptance. Most Americans no longer drink water directly from the tap but rely on either filters or bottled water. As demonstrated by fieldwork among New York City water-filter users, filters have the power to restore tap water's acceptability, making this an interesting site to examine the imagined qualities of water and the technopolitics of filtration. Such an examination allows the ethnographic gaze to attend to both the monumental and mundane operations of infrastructures. Unlike other mediating technologies, water filters have a salient catch-all quality, one that allows filters in the US to participate in a plurality of hydrosocial situations. They furthermore mediate multiple worries and projects around tap water, and they give a semblance of control to users equipped with diverse understandings of how filters function.
To better understand water security of communities in North Carolina, this research uses structural topic modeling (STM) and geographic mapping to identify the main topics and pollutant categories being researched and the areas exposed to drinking water contaminants. The textual data derived from the journal article abstracts that examined water pollution in North Carolina is from 1964 to present. The STM analysis of textual data is paired with socio-demographic data from the 2015-2019 American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year estimates and water pollution data from North Carolina state agencies. The STM findings show that the most discussed topics relate to runoff management, wastewater from concentrated agricultural feeding operations, emerging contaminants, land development, and health impacts as a result of water contamination. The article discusses how the topics especially threaten groundwater resources used by community water systems and private wells. Those communities served by private wells are predominantly low-income and minority populations. As a result, threats to groundwater supplies exacerbate existing issues of environmental justice in North Carolina, especially in the Coastal Plains Region. The STM findings revealed that several key threats to safe drinking water are less covered by academic literature, such as poultry concentrated agricultural feeding operations and climate impacts, which may increase disparities in water access in North Carolina.
From the start of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Navajo Nation, Diné (Navajo) traditional knowledge holders (TKHs), such as medicine men and women and traditional practitioners, contributed their services and healing practices. Although TKHs are not always fully acknowledged in the western health care system, they have an established role to protect and promote the health of Diné people. To date, their roles in mitigating the COVID-19 pandemic have not been fully explored. The purpose of this research was to understand the social and cultural contexts of the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines based on the roles and perspectives of Diné TKHs. A multi-investigator consensus analysis was conducted by six American Indian researchers using interviews with TKHs collected between December 2021–January 2022. The Hózhó Resilience Model was used as a framework to analyze the data using four parent themes: COVID-19, harmony and relationships, spirituality, and respect for self and discipline. These parent themes were further organized into promoters and/or barriers for 12 sub-themes that emerged from the data, such as traditional knowledge, Diné identity, and vaccine. Overall, the analysis showed key factors that could be applied in pandemic planning and public health mitigation efforts based on the cultural perspective of TKHs.
A range of innovative off‐grid sanitation technologies have been developed and deployed to improve sanitation in cities where networked sanitation by publicly managed sewers is insufficient. Studies of such technologies tend to consider toilets as static, where technologies are chosen once, at the project onset and in isolation from each other. In this study we explore off‐grid sanitation as heterogeneous infrastructure configurations of people and toilets, roles and responsibilities, costs and benefits. Using two cases from Kampala, we emphasize that there are relationships between the different parts of infrastructure, and that these relationships vary over time and space. Urban residents rework configurations by changing a toilet and changing which toilets are used in order to meet their diverse sanitation desires. We demonstrate technological diversity, connect this diversity to the preferences of users by showing linkages between toilets that are proximate to each other, and show the importance of considering relations between toilets over time. Our analysis demonstrates how operations, cultural orientations, payment mechanisms and limitations have a significant bearing on feasibility, scalability, and integration into city‐wide sanitation, and that this is often not foreseen in planning phases. We thus conclude that sanitation configurations that enable flexibility rather than trying to predict needs may well enable more reliable infrastructure.
This chapter focusses on providing a suitable discussion of water security from a global perspective, highlighting the various primary themes which play a role either by affecting water security or factors which need to be considered for water security to persist. The discussion of water security from a global perspective also emphasises the recognised importance of water and sanitation through continuous recognition and placing it at the top of the global agenda in an attempt to secure water resources for the future. This is followed by a synthesis of South Africa’s troubling freshwater reality. The main issues which have contributed to South Africa’s major freshwater challenges are discussed with the use of case studies and/or real-world examples to illustrate the country’s actual freshwater predicament. The different facets of South Africa’s water crisis and how these can be addressed to transform the predicament into opportunities with informed decisions and proactive management is also discussed. Matters which require urgent attention are highlighted and interventions and/or solutions are given based on the primary cause of a specific water crisis and/or problem. The pertinent issues which require urgent informed actions are emphasised and possible measures or solutions is suggested to provide a way forward.
Climate change means that many more people find themselves living in areas of environmental disadvantage, with water insecurity recognized as a major health issue. Local ecologies shape everyday hygiene practices in households as people respond to diurnal and seasonal changes in their external environment. Periods of water shortage paradoxically increase the risk of waterborne diseases such as cholera, exacerbated by reduced washing to conserve limited supplies. Unpredictable periods of drought and/or flooding compromise household income, and families cannot afford the basic resources they need to keep themselves and others clean. The risks of water borne diseases, such as typhoid, giardia and cholera, are reduced by strategies that improve the sourcing, storage, and treatment of drinking water in areas of environmental disadvantage. In this chapter we first outline global water insecurity in the context of climate change and the negative effects on people’s physical and mental health. We develop our ideas by drawing on our fieldwork, specifically depth interviews with over 50 people living in Kware, Ongata Rongai outside Nairobi, Kenya, to consider how people negotiate persistent water insecurity in resource-limited settings. We conclude the chapter with reflections on the barriers and opportunities to improve water security and hygiene practices.
Globally, rapid population growth in cities, regulatory and governance failures, poor infrastructure, inadequate funding for urban water systems, and the impacts of climate change are each rapidly reconfiguring regional hydrosocial relations. In the United States, these hydrosocial reconfigurations tend to reinforce racial inequalities tied to infrastructure, exacerbating environmental injustices. More generally, according to a framework of racial capitalism, infrastructural regions and hydrosocial relations are always already racialized and structured simultaneously by capitalism and racism. In this paper, we integrate hydrosocial and racial justice perspectives with the literature on infrastructural regionalism to examine Atlanta’s position in the so-called tri-state water wars between Alabama, Georgia and Florida. Combining analysis of academic, policy, and legal documents, journalistic accounts, and semi-structured interviews with water conservationists and managers working in Atlanta, we examine conflicts over water use in the infrastructural region of the Apalachicola–Chattahoochee–Flint (ACF) river system. We emphasize that the ACF conflict reworks regional hydrosocial relations through territorializations of racial capitalism. We demonstrate how particular discourses that reify Atlanta as a monolith overly simplify the regional dimensions of the crisis, diminishing the views, roles and interventions of diverse actors in the ACF region. We argue that work on infrastructure regionalism and water governance can be deepened through attention to the hydro-racial fix.
The current study examines whether social and economic factors affect the geographic distribution of safe drinking water act (SDWA) violations at the county-level, 2016–2018. Our research controls for a variety of factors in an effort to assess whether community ethnicity, poverty, and racial characteristics appear to be related to the geographic distribution of SDWA violations. The results indicated that populations that are exposed to unsafe drinking water are clustered in certain areas. There appears to be a “contaminated drinking water belt” in the Southwest and South regions, which are concentrated in California’s Central Valley, the Texas colonias, and the rural South. Consistent with the spatial cluster results, the zero-inflated count regression model showed that the percentage of Hispanics was a significant predictor of SDWA violations. In addition, the results indicated that counties with SDWA violations and persistent poverty co-occur, suggesting that concentrated poverty matters, and has a negative impact on local drinking water quality.
This article draws on scholarship in Southern theory to ‘world’ the study of water’s urbanization. This means complicating scholarship by widening the focus beyond the application of Northern norms to engage with complex and diverse practices in Southern cities. For water’s urbanization, this means focusing on what water supply is for the majority: neither the centralized piped-water network nor its absence, but the range of practices and technologies that unite people, nature and artefacts in a complex socio-ecological politics of water. Drawing on scholarship from Southern urbanisms, urban political ecology, and science and technology studies, we illustrate how expanding water’s urbanization to include more than networked infrastructure in Jakarta draws attention to the importance of ecological connections between piped water, groundwater, wastewater and floodwater. Thinking beyond the network requires deeper engagement with the ecological connections between the diverse flows of water in and around urban environments. These produce distinct forms of fragmentation that are missed when analysis is limited to piped-water supply. The emphasis on ecological connections between flows of water and power seeks to draw attention back to the importance of the uneven exposure to environmental hazards in cities in which neither water nor nature are wholly contained by infrastructure.
Using a relational approach, I examine several cultural dimensions involved in household water access and use in Newtok, Alaska. I describe the patterns that emerge around domestic water access and use, as well as the subjective lived experiences of water insecurity including risk perceptions, and the daily work and hydro-social relationships involved in accessing water from various sources. I found that Newtok residents haul water in limited amounts from a multitude of sources, both treated and untreated, throughout the year. Household water access is tied to hydro-social relationships predicated on sharing and reciprocity, particularly when the primary treated water access point is unavailable. Older boys and young men are primarily responsible for hauling water, and this role appears to be important to male Yupik identity. Many interviewees described preferring to drink untreated water, a practice that appears related to cultural constructions of natural water sources as pure and self-purifying, as well as concerns about the safety of treated water. Concerns related to the health consequences of low water access appear to differ by gender and age, with women and elders expressing greater concern than men. These preliminary results point to the importance of understanding the cultural dimensions involved in household water access and use. I argue that institutional responses to water insecurity need to incorporate such cultural dimensions into solutions aimed at increasing household access to and use of water.
Despite the central importance of water for human wellbeing and development, researchers and practitioners have few tools to quantitatively measure, assess, and compare the scope and scale of household and individual water insecurity across cultural and climatic variations. There are multiple definitions of water insecurity, and the analytical tools for measuring household‐level water insecurity are in their infancy. This paper provides an overview and systematic evaluation of current household and individual water in security metrics for human development. We seek to advance micro‐level metrics—attending to the considerations of dimensionality, temporality, unit of analysis, and comparability—because they will provide the research community with necessary tools to untangle the complex determinants and outcomes of water insecurity. Moreover, such metrics will support the translation of research outcomes into meaningful and useful products and results for stakeholders, communities, and decision‐makers. WIREs Water 2017, 4:e1214. doi: 10.1002/wat2.1214
This article is categorized under: Human Water > Methods
The lead poisoning of Flint, Michigan’s water is popularly framed as a case of “environmental racism” given that Flint’s population is mostly black and lower income. In this essay I argue that we see the environmental racism that underlies Flint’s water poisoning not as incidental to our political-economic order, nor even as stemming from racist intent, but as inseparable from liberalism, an organizing logic we take for granted in our modern age. I expand on the idea of “racial liberalism” here. While upholding the promise of individual freedoms and equality for all, racial liberalism—particularly as it was translated into urban renewal and property making in mid-20th-century urban America—drove dispossession. In Flint racialized property dispossession has been one major factor underlying the city’s financial duress, abandonment, and poisoned infrastructure. Yet, through austerity discourse, Flint is disciplined as if it were a financially reckless individual while the structural and historical causes of its duress are masked. Tracing the history of property making and taking in Flint and the effects of austerity urbanism on its water infrastructure, my central argument is that our understanding of Flint’s predicament—the disproportionate poisoning of young African-Americans—can be deepened if we read it as a case of racial liberalism’s illiberal legacies.
Small-scale decentralised facilities and household-level water purification technologies (HWTs) have become unconventional modes of delivering potable water. This paper examines how HWTs transformed from a temporary solution to unsanitary drinking water conditions in the global South to a legitimised technological fix for communities that experience chronic household water insecurity in the United States. We examine the discursive and material processes through which HWTs are applied in periurban and rural subdivisions on the Texas–Mexico border, called colonias. HWTs, through the intervention of social entrepreneurs, experts, and the state, mediate water governance by rearticulating the individual solution and foreclosing a collective or political process to improve community water systems for colonia residents.
This article examines household-level characteristics that predict water insecurity in low-income rural and periurban communities on the Texas–Mexico border. We employ two logistic regression models (binary and ordered) to identify household characteristics that are more likely to result in water insecurity. Our analyses yielded unexpected findings: Whereas socioeconomic factors are weak predictors, immigration status of household members is a significant variable that contributes to household water insecurity. Policymakers need to pay more attention to marginalized communities as " universal " water access still leaves populations without adequate, reliable, and affordable water in the Global North. Este artículo examina, en el area limítrofe Texas-M exico, las características que a nivel de hogares predicen problemas de inseguridad hídrica en comunidades rurales y periurbanas de bajos ingresos. Empleamos dos modelos de regresi on logística (binario y ordenado) para identificar las características de los hogares m as propensos a ser afectados por la inseguridad hídrica. Nuestros an alisis generaron resultados inesperados: En tanto que los factores socioecon omicos son predictores d ebiles, el estatus de inmigraci on de los miembros del hogar es una variable significativa que contribuye a la inseguridad hídrica del hogar. Los encargados de formular políticas deben poner mayor atenci on a las comunidades marginadas, por cuanto el acceso " universal " al agua todavía deja poblaciones en el Norte Global sin agua adecuada, confiable y econ omicamente accesible. Palabras clave: colonias, seguridad hídrica para el hogar, regresi on logística, Texas, recursos hídricos.
This article reconsiders the epistemic and geographic boundaries that have long separated scholarship on urban water poverty and politics in the Global North and South. We stage an encounter between the seemingly dissimilar cases of Tooleville outside of the city of Exeter in California’s Central Valley and Bommanahalli outside of Bangalore, India, to illuminate the geography of water marginalization at the fringes of urban areas, and to deepen cross-fertilization between two geographic literatures: environmental justice (EJ) and urban political ecology (UPE). We argue that there is scope for transnational learning in three arenas in particular: (1) water access, (2) state practice, and (3) political agency. In so doing, we aim to advance a genuinely post-colonial approach to theory and practice in the pressing arena of urban water politics.
Downloadable at: www.farhanasultana.com
This Advanced Review analyzes recent debates over the human right to water. While accepting critiques from scholars that the right to water risks entrenching unequal and unjust forms of water governance, the paper nevertheless takes a more sympathetic view of the potentials within struggles for the right to water. Recognizing that such struggles can take many different forms, we urge scholars to adopt more nuanced and geographically sensitive analyses of the conditions out of which movements for the right to water have emerged. We reject the claim that the right to water depoliticises struggles for water justice and we instead find conditions of possibility for deeper and more lasting changes to water governance within struggles for the right to water.For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.Conflict of interest: The authors have declared no conflicts of interest for this article.
This article provides a framework for understanding water problems as problems of justice. Drawing on wider (environmental) justice approaches, informed by interdisciplinary ontologies that define water as simultaneously natural (material) and social, and based on an explicit acceptance of water problems as always contested, the article posits that water justice is embedded and specific to historical and socio-cultural contexts. Water justice includes but transcends questions of distribution to include those of cultural recognition and political participation, and is intimately linked to the integrity of ecosystems. Justice requires the creative building of bridges and alliances across differences.
With few exceptions, STS theories of infrastructure stability and change have not been applied to circumstances in the South. Developed in post-War Europe, these theories are often applied in ways that lack transferability to situations where infrastructure conditions are precarious and hybrid. This article seeks to broaden these theories by relating them to infrastructure challenges common to the South, drawing in particular on prevalent issues in water supply. Such engagement helps to identify shortcomings in these theories, to push their paradigms further, and to raise new questions related to infrastructure configuration, stability, and transition. As such, the study of sociotechnical systems across a range of contexts can be enriched. In particular, this article extends theory by placing coexistence among sociotechnical systems, as opposed to the universality of a single dominant infrastructure network, at the center of enquiry. Recognizing coexistence is important because it enables one to decouple key concepts in STS from the presumption of universalized and uniform networks, enabling them to become relevant for the South. Examples discussed in this essay include stability or “momentum” and transitions.
With this article, we develop the Drinking Water Disparities Framework to explain environmental injustice in the context of drinking water in the United States. The framework builds on the social epidemiology and environmental justice literatures, and is populated with 5 years of field data (2005-2010) from California's San Joaquin Valley. We trace the mechanisms through which natural, built, and sociopolitical factors work through state, county, community, and household actors to constrain access to safe water and to financial resources for communities. These constraints and regulatory failures produce social disparities in exposure to drinking water contaminants. Water system and household coping capacities lead, at best, to partial protection against exposure. This composite burden explains the origins and persistence of social disparities in exposure to drinking water contaminants. (Am J Public Health. Published online ahead of print February 13, 2014: e1-e9. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2013.301664).
This paper develops a household water security measurement for low-income peri-urban and rural communities (“colonias”) on the US–Mexico border. The complexity of a “no-win” waterscape – where water service exists but is relatively expensive and water quality is still precarious – precludes a meaningful assessment and analysis because there are no existing measurement tools to capture water insecurity at the household level. Informed by critical environmental epistemology, the paper incorporates perspectives from colonias residents through qualitative research and survey development. The study advances previous work on water security by developing a cumulative scale for each characteristic of household water security then clusters households into water security classes using a non-parametric statistical procedure. The analysis identified four water security classes: (1) Water Secure; (2) Marginally Water Secure; (3) Marginally Water Insecure; (4) Water Insecure. While all households in the survey are connected to water service, only 45% are broadly “water secure” while 55% are “water insecure.” Statistical analysis confirmed the robustness of the scaling and clustering procedure, thus, providing evidence to describe household water insecurity in “no-win” waterscapes.
Insecure access to food and water are experienced by millions of people around the world. Not only does insecure access to food and water represent a violation of basic human rights, it is a major threat to the physical and mental health of individuals and communities. There is, therefore, great need for tools to identify those who are food and water insecure and the severity of their insecurity. We argue here that measures of food and water insecurity must not only reflect biological requirements but also the biocultural nature of food and water needs. In this paper, we present case studies from Tanzania and Bolivia that detail the steps used to adapt or create experience-based measures and validate these measures using a suite of established approaches. We also show that, by broadening our understanding of insecurity to include respondents' experiences, the full range of health impacts-including psychosocial stress and mental health-become apparent. We conclude by noting limitations of the biocultural approach and offer suggestions for future research.
Waterborne diseases are a serious concern in the sister cities of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, where many residents still lack access to plumbing. After using a relative risk method to illustrate the characteristics of neighborhoods at risk for waterborne diseases based on lack of plumbing, we ran spatial regression models predicting lack of plumbing to uncover similarities and differences between the two cities. In terms of similarities, lower mean education and higher proportions of young children were associated with lacking plumbing in both cities. Lower population density and higher proportions of female-headed households were significant only in Juárez, and proportion renting was negatively associated with lacking plumbing in Juárez, but positively associated in El Paso, pointing to differences in socio-spatial structure between the cities. In framing this issue as an environmental injustice, this study draws attention of the existence of households lacking plumbing in the United States and Mexico.
Foreword.- Section I - General Considerations in Geospatial Analysis of Environmental Health.- 1.Environmental Health and Geospatial Analysis: An Overview.- 2. Using GeoVisualization and Geospatial Analysis to Explore Respiratory Disease and Environmental Health Justice in New York City.- 3. Outdoor Air Pollution and Health - A review of the Contributions of Geotechnologies to Exposure Assessment.- 4. The Use of Residential History in Environmental Health Studies.- 5. Proximity Analysis Methods for Exposure Assessment in Environmental Health Justice Research.- Section II - Impacts on Environmental Health (Topical Case Studies).- 7. Geospatial analysis of West Nile virus (WNV) incidences in an urban environment: A Case Study in the Twin Cities Metropolitan Area of Minnesota.- 8. The Health Impacts of Brownfields in Charlotte NC: A Spatial Approach.- 9. Regional Environmental Patterns of Diarrheal Disease in Bangladesh: A Spatial Analytical and Multilevel Approach.- 10. Developing a Supermarket Need Index for New York City.- 11. Asthma, Air Quality, and Environmental Justice in Louisville, Kentucky.- 12. The Impact of Changes in Municipal Solid Waste Disposal Laws on Proximity to Environmental Hazards: A Case Study of Connecticut.- 13.Global Geographies of Environmental Injustice and Health: A Case Study of Illegal Hazardous Waste Dumping in Cote d'Ivoire.- 14. Environmental and Health Inequalities of Women in Different Neighbourhoods of Metropolitan Lagos, Nigeria.- 15. Housing Quality and Racial Disparities in Low Birth Weight: A GIS Assessment in Flint, Michigan.- Section III - Geospatial Methods in Investigating Environmental Health.- 16. Participatory mapping as a component of operational malaria vector control in Tanzania.- 17. Revisiting Tobler's First Law of Geography: Spatial Regression Models for Assessing Environmental Justice and Health Risk Disparities.- 18. A Spatially Explicit Environmental Health Surveillance Framework for Tick-Borne Diseases.- 19. Using Distance Decay Techniques and Household-Level Data to Explore Regional Variation in Environmental Inequality.- 20. Merging Satellite Measurement with Ground-based Air Quality Monitoring Data to Assess Health Effects of Fine Particulate Matter Pollution.- 21. Poverty Determinants of Acute Respiratory Infections in the Mapuche Population of Ninth Region of Araucania, Chile (2000-2005). A Bayesian Approach with Time-space Modelling.- 22. GIS and Atmospheric Diffusion Modeling for Assessment of Individual Exposure to Dioxins Emitted from a Municipal Solid Waste Incinerator.- 23. Synthesizing waterborne infection prevalence for comparative analysis of cluster detection methods.- 24. Spatiotemporal Analysis of PM2.5 Exposure in Taipei (Taiwan) by integrating PM10 and TSP observations.- Index.
We have survived Canada's assault on our identity and our rights … Our survival is a testament to our determination and will to survive as a people. We are prepared to participate in Canada's future—but only on the terms that we believe to be our rightful heritage. Wallace Labillois, Council of Elders, Kingsclear, New Brunswick This paper argues for a strengthening of the theoretical relationship between neo-liberalism and environmental justice. Empirical research involving First Nations communities in southwestern Ontario suggests that neo-liberal reforms introduced in the mid-1990s were particularly discriminatory against Canada's indigenous peoples, serving to exacerbate historical disparities in health, environment pollution, and well-being. In particular, under neo-liberal reform in Ontario, recognition of environmental injustices has become much more difficult for First Nations communities. Furthermore, this ‘new’ form of environmental governance has broadly reduced legitimate opportunities for First Nations to participate in environmental governance that affects their health and welfare. In short, this research supports a widening of the definition of environmental justice advocated by David Schlosberg and others (Environmental Politics, 13(3) (2004), pp. 517–540; Agyeman, Bullard and Evans 20031.
Agyeman , J. ,
Bullard , R. D. and
Evans , B. 2003a. “Joined-up thinking: bringing together sustainability, environmental justice and equity”. In Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World, Edited by:
Agyeman , J. ,
Bullard , R. D. and
Evans , B. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. View all references; Akwesasne Task Force on the Environment, Research Advisory committee 1997; Di Chiro 19988.
Di Chiro , Giovanna. 1998. “Environmental Justice from the Grassroots: Reflections on History, Gender and Expertise”. In The Struggle for Ecological Democracy: Environmental Justice Movements in the United States, Edited by:
Faber , D. NY: Guilford. View all references) if we are to understand the subtle, complex and multiple ways that this new form of environmental governance is particularly harmful to marginalized groups, such as First Nations in Canada.
Contrary to reports of 100% access to safe water and sanitation in international surveys, the United States (US) has a complex landscape of low-income water problems. This paper begins with a critical international perspective on water and poverty in the US. It shows that the US had a declining role in international water programs during the late-20th century, which contributed to limited international awareness of low-income water programs in the US, and limited US awareness of low-income water issues. To address the first problem, we provide an overview of low-income water programs in the US with an emphasis on those that serve small communities. We then examine census data on inadequate water systems in Colorado, which indicate that severe plumbing deficiencies persist despite these public water programs. Inadequate plumbing rates are lower than income poverty rates, however, which indicate partially successful strategies for achieving low-income water services. Analysis of local data in urban, rural, and mountainous areas of the state shows that poverty and water problems are correlated in complex ways, which has implications for all nations striving for universal access to safe water and sanitation.
Geographically weighted regression (GWR) is an important local technique for exploring spatial heterogeneity in data relationships. In fitting with Tobler's first law of geography, each local regression of GWR is estimated with data whose influence decays with distance, distances that are commonly defined as straight line or Euclidean. However, the complexity of our real world ensures that the scope of possible distance metrics is far larger than the traditional Euclidean choice. Thus in this article, the GWR model is investigated by applying it with alternative, non-Euclidean distance (non-ED) metrics. Here we use as a case study, a London house price data set coupled with hedonic independent variables, where GWR models are calibrated with Euclidean distance (ED), road network distance and travel time metrics. The results indicate that GWR calibrated with a non-Euclidean metric can not only improve model fit, but also provide additional and useful insights into the nature of varying relationships within the house price data set.
Water supply privatization was emblematic of the neoliberal turn in development policy in the 1990s. Proponents argued that the private sector could provide better services at lower costs than governments; opponents questioned the risks involved in delegating control over a life-sustaining resource to for-profit companies. Private-sector activity was most concentrated—and contested—in large cities in developing countries, where the widespread lack of access to networked water supplies was characterized as a global crisis.
In Privatizing Water, Karen Bakker focuses on three questions: Why did privatization emerge as a preferred alternative for managing urban water supply? Can privatization fulfill its proponents' expectations, particularly with respect to water supply to the urban poor? And, given the apparent shortcomings of both privatization and conventional approaches to government provision, what are the alternatives? In answering these questions, Bakker engages with broader debates over the role of the private sector in development, the role of urban communities in the provision of "public" services, and the governance of public goods. She introduces the concept of "governance failure" as a means of exploring the limitations facing both private companies and governments.
Critically examining a range of issues—including the transnational struggle over the human right to water, the "commons" as a water-supply-management strategy, and the environmental dimensions of water privatization—Privatizing Water is a balanced exploration of a critical issue that affects billions of people around the world.
The purpose of this book is to present an overview of the latest research, policy, practitioner, academic and international thinking on water security—an issue that, like water governance a few years ago, has developed much policy awareness and momentum with a wide range of stakeholders. As a concept it is open to multiple interpretations, and the authors here set out the various approaches to the topic from different perspectives.
Key themes addressed include:
Water security as a foreign policy issue
The interconnected variables of water, food, and human security
Dimensions other than military and international relations concerns around water security
Water security theory and methods, tools and audits.
The book is loosely based on a masters level degree plus a short professional course on water security both given at the University of East Anglia, delivered by international authorities on their subjects. It should serve as an introductory textbook as well as be of value to professionals, NGOs, and policy-makers.
https://www.routledge.com/Water-Security-Principles-Perspectives-and-Practices/Lankford-Bakker-Zeitoun-Conway/p/book/9780415534710
Household water insecurity has serious implications for the health, livelihoods and wellbeing of people around the world. Existing methods to assess the state of household water insecurity focus largely on water quality, quantity or adequacy, source or reliability, and affordability. These methods have significant advantages in terms of their simplicity and comparability, but are widely recognized to oversimplify and underestimate the global burden of household water insecurity. In contrast, a broader definition of household water insecurity should include entitlements and human capabilities, socio-cultural dynamics, and political institutions and processes. This paper proposes a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods that can be widely adopted across cultural, geographic, and demographic contexts to assess hard-to-measure dimensions of household water insecurity. In doing so, it critically evaluates existing methods for assessing household water insecurity and suggests ways in which methodological innovations advance a broader definition of household water insecurity.
Our aim in this paper is not to abandon, but rather reconceptualize,
water security in ways that explicitly link to broader
social and political relations that enable benefits to water related
services (e.g., drinking, recreation, productive uses, cultural practices)
rather than focus on the materiality of access to water in
and of itself. Our conceptualization of water security draws on
Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum’s ‘‘capabilities approach,1” a
moral and political philosophical framework that centers on wellbeing,
human development, and justice. We envision water security
as both grounded in the social relations of access to water as well as
critical to a set of relations and functionings that advance human
flourishing. As such, we challenge the dominant view of water security
that identifies water as a predominantly material object (‘H2O’)
that needs to be ‘secured,’ a view that points towards interventions
to capture water to alleviate or address situations where it is deficient
or scarce. Instead, we reposition water security as a hydrosocial
process rather than a static goal or objective.
In this third progress report I consider the politics of settler colonialism in relation to nonnative people of color. Settler colonialism has become an increasingly important concept over the past decade, and while geographers typically think about it from a white/native perspective, I explore how ethnic studies, specifically, Chicana/o studies, has responded to it. For different reasons both disciplines have hesitated to fully interrogate the significance of the concept. In the case of geography, the whiteness of the discipline has caused it to overlook vibrant debates within ethnic studies. Chicana/o studies has not directly engaged with settler colonialism because, I argue, it has the potential to disrupt core elements of Chicana/o political subjectivity. Specifically, it unsettles Chicanas/os’ conception of themselves as colonized people by highlighting their role as colonizers. Acknowledging such a role is difficult not only because it challenges key dimensions of Chicana/o identity, as seen in Aztlán, Chicanas/os’ mythical homeland, but also because of the precarious nature of Chicana/o indigeneity. Examining Chicana/o studies’ muted response to settler colonialism illustrates the impoverished nature of geography’s study of race.
We explore the relationship between water security (WS) and adaptive capacity (AC); the two concepts are connected because achieving the first may be dependent on building the second. We focus on how metrics of WS and AC are operationalized and what implications they may have for short- and long-term management. We argue that rather than static conceptualizations of WS and AC, we need to understand what combinations of capacities are needed as a function of how controllable key parameters of WS are and the types of outcomes we seek to achieve. We offer a conceptual model of the relationship between WS and AC to clarify what aspects of human-water interactions each concept emphasizes and suggest a hypothetical example of how decision-makers may use these ideas.
In this paper we review literature and suggest a framework to
examine and measure urban water security as it interacts with
urbanization and urban-regional systems. We develop a
comprehensive framework to start bridging that gap. In this
framework, urban water security is shaped by five interacting
social and environmental domains. These are Sociodemographic,
Economic, Technological, Ecological, and
Governance (SETEG). We suggest a few indicators and
aggregation methods that can shed light on the
multidimensional and interconnected nature of urban water
security, and illuminate different levels of influence among the
five SETEG domains. By improving the selection of indicators
for the multiple SETEG domains and interactions creating
urban water security (or insecurity), combined approaches
such as the one outlined above might help move a scattered
array of water security goals towards the creation of informed,
cohesive and relevant policy interventions.
Relationality is a persistent concern of socio-spatial theory, increasingly invoked in geographical scholarship. We bring geographical scholarship on relationality to bear on relational poverty studies, an emergent body of work that challenges mainstream approaches to conceptualizing, explaining, researching and acting upon poverty. We argue that relationality scholarship provides ontological, theoretical, and epistemological interventions that extend prior relational poverty work. We synthesize these three elements to develop an explicitly geographical relationality and show how this framework offers a politics of possibility for knowing and acting on poverty in new ways.
In this report I argue that environmental racism is constituent of racial capitalism. While the environmental justice movement has been a success on many levels, there is compelling evidence that it has not succeeded in actually improving the environments of vulnerable communities. One reason for this is because we are not conceptualizing the problem correctly. I build my argument by first emphasizing the centrality of the production of social difference in creating value. Second, I review how the devaluation of nonwhite bodies has been incorporated into economic processes and advocate for extending such frameworks to include pollution. And lastly, I turn to the state. If, in fact, environmental racism is constituent of racial capitalism, then this suggests that activists and researchers should view the state as a site of contestation, rather than as an ally or neutral force.
As an essential resource, water has been the object of warfare, political wrangling, and individual and corporate abuse. It has also become an object of commodification, with multinational corporations vying for water supply contracts in many countries. In Precious Commodity, Martin V. Melosi examines water resources in the United States and addresses whether access to water is an inalienable right of citizens, and if government is responsible for its distribution as a public good. Melosi provides historical background on the construction, administration, and adaptability of water supply and wastewater systems in urban America. He cites budgetary constraints and the deterioration of existing water infrastructures as factors leading many municipalities to seriously consider the privatization of their water supply. Melosi also views the role of government in the management of, development of, and legal jurisdiction over America's rivers and waterways for hydroelectric power, flood control, irrigation, and transportation access. Looking to the future, he compares the costs and benefits of public versus private water supply, examining the global movement toward privatization.
Unreliable water access significantly impairs household health and welfare. While press and policy reports suggest that residents of mobile home communities in the United States experience unreliable water access, scholarly examination of this issue has been lacking. Using data from the 2011 American Housing Survey, we first present descriptive evidence of disparities in water service reliability and then construct a binary logit regression model assessing the correlates of reliable provision. We find that living in a mobile home unit, and especially in a mobile home park, is significantly and negatively correlated with water service reliability. Our findings demonstrate the need for future research to assess the mechanisms of water service reliability within mobile home parks, as well as the relationship between living in a mobile home and other dimensions of household water security.
This article examines the role of water infrastructure in the production of state power, and advances an understanding of nonhumans as power brokers. While state power is increasingly understood as the effect of material practices and processes, I draw on the idea that objects are ‘force-full’ to argue that infrastructure helped cement federal state power in Tijuana over the twentieth century, and simultaneously limited the spaces of stateness in surprising ways. To support my argument, I examine three sets of water infrastructure in Tijuana, Mexico. First, I examine the key constitutional edicts, laws, and treaties that enabled bureaucratic development and staked territorial claims on water during Mexico’s liberal era (1876–1911) and post-revolutionary period. Second, I trace the development of Tijuana’s flood control and potable water conveyance networks, designed and built between the 1960s and the 1980s, which enabled rapid urban growth but ultimately cultivated dependency on a distant, state engineered water source. Finally, I show how the ordinary infrastructures of water supply—such as barrels, cisterns, and buckets, common tools in Tijuana homes—both coexist with and limit state power, resulting in variegated geographies of institutional authority, punctuated by alternative spaces of rule. Together, these infrastructures form the ‘hydrosocial cycle’ of Tijuana, which I use to illustrate the uneven spatiality of state power. In conclusion, I draw on insights from object-oriented philosophy and science and technology studies to move past the anthropocentric notion of infrastructure as ‘power tools’—handy implements used by humans to exercise dominion—toward tool-power: the idea that objects-in-themselves are wellsprings of power.
This paper rereads debates over water security and insecurity through the tools of critical geographical scholarship. It seeks to demonstrate the value of such a critical perspective in achieving access to water for all. While rejecting a simplistic dismissal of mainstream discourses on water security, the paper notes the failure to adequately politicise the processes and relationships that reproduce water inequalities. Finding lessons in recent writings on political ecology, the hydro-social cycle and on the right to water, the paper concludes with a Gramscian claim to build from the fragmented but situated knowledges implicit in struggles to achieve democratic access to water.
This article aims to improve understanding of the nexus between poverty and homelessness, with a particular focus on families with children. It draws on relational poverty analysis which analyses the processes, structures and social relations which create and sustain poverty. The article is based on a longitudinal and qualitative study of Australian families with children during and after periods of homelessness, which found that the families experienced not only a lack of material resources but also the social and other processes that impoverish, exclude and disempower, including exposure to violence, lack of family and institutional support, and pressure to relinquish children. The participants had a strong social identity as families and actively resisted the marginalization and individuation processes they encountered. The article argues that conceptualizing homelessness as a process of “destitution” can provide a theoretical basis for understanding the relationship between poverty and homelessness which to date remains remarkably unexplored.
This paper presents a comprehensive review of the concept of water security, including both academic and policy literatures. The analysis indicates that the use of the term water security has increased significantly in the past decade, across multiple disciplines. The paper presents a comparison of definitions of, and analytical approaches to, water security across the natural and social sciences, which indicates that distinct, and at times incommensurable, methods and scales of analysis are being used. We consider the advantages and disadvantages of narrow versus broad and integrative framings of water security, and explore their utility with reference to integrated water resources management. In conclusion, we argue that an integrative approach to water security brings issues of good governance to the fore, and thus holds promise as a new approach to water management.
Losses from environmental hazards have escalated in the past decade, prompting a reorientation of emergency management systems away from simple postevent response. There is a noticeable change in policy, with more emphasis on loss reduction through mitigation, preparedness, and recovery programs. Effective mitigation of losses from hazards requires hazard identification, an assessment of all the hazards likely to affect a given place, and risk-reduction measures that are compatible across a multitude of hazards. The degree to which populations are vulnerable to hazards, however, is not solely dependent upon proximity to the source of the threat or the physical nature of the hazard –social factors also play a significant role in determining vulnerability. This paper presents a method for assessing vulnerability in spatial terms using both biophysical and social indicators. A geographic information system was utilized to establish areas of vulnerability based upon twelve environmental threats and eight social characteristics for our study area, Georgetown County, South Carolina. Our results suggest that the most biophysically vulnerable places do not always spatially intersect with the most vulnerable populations. This is an important finding because it reflects the likely ‘social costs’ of hazards on the region. While economic losses might be large in areas of high biophysical risk, the resident population also may have greater safety nets (insurance, additional financial resources) to absorb and recover from the loss quickly. Conversely, it would take only a moderate hazard event to disrupt the well-being of the majority of county residents (who are more socially vulnerable, but perhaps do not reside in the highest areas of biophysical risks) and retard their longer-term recovery from disasters. This paper advances our theoretical and conceptual understanding of the spatial dimensions of vulnerability. It further highlights the merger of conceptualizations of human environment relationships with geographical techniques in understanding contemporary public policy issues.
Previous quantitative research on environmental justice has been limited by simplistic
assumptions used to measure health risks and traditional regression techniques that fail
to discern spatial variations in statistical relationships. We address these gaps through a
case study that examines: (a) whether potential health risks from exposure to hazardous
air pollutants in Florida are related to race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status, and (b)
how the significance of statistical associations between health risk and race/ethnicity or
socioeconomic status vary across the state. This study integrates census tract level estimates
of cumulative cancer risk compiled by the EPA with Census 2000 data and a spatial
statistical technique known as geographically weighted regression that allows us to
explore spatial variability in analytical results. Our findings indicate that while race and
ethnicity are significantly related to cancer risks in Florida, conventional regression can
hide important local variations in statistical relationships relevant to environmental justice
analysis.
New strategies for analyzing water security have the potential to improve coordination and generate synergies between researchers, policy-makers, and practitioners.
What might be the implications for urban studies if we take ‘comparison’ not just as a method, but as a mode of thought that informs how urban theory is constituted? Comparative research is experiencing resurgence in urban studies, yet there has been little effort to critically debate how comparison might take place, particularly in reference to comparison across the global ‘North–South divide’. Existing epistemologies of comparative research have focused on the domains of practicalities, methodologies and typologies. Notwithstanding the value of these debates, this article offers an alternative framing of comparison that focuses attention on theory cultures, learning and ethico-politics, drawing on postcolonial debates. This approach works with an expansive conception of comparison that positions comparison as a strategy. The article concludes by outlining three implications for urban research.
Qu’en serait-il des études urbaines si la ‘comparaison’était considérée non pas seulement comme une méthode, mais comme un mode de réflexion qui éclaire la manière dont la théorie urbaine est établie? Les recherches comparatives connaissent une renaissance en études urbaines, mais rares sont les tentatives de débat critique sur les modalités d’une comparaison, notamment au-delà de la division Nord-Sud. Les épistémologies existantes de la recherche comparative se sont attachées à trois domaines: pratique, méthodologique et typologique. Sans nier la valeur de ces analyses, un cadre de comparaison alternatif est proposé ici, inspiré des débats postcoloniaux et axé sur les cultures de la théorie, l’apprentissage et l’éthico-politique. Cette approche obéit à une conception élargie de la comparaison, laquelle est positionnée en tant que stratégie. La conclusion dépeint trois implications pour la recherche urbaine.
Source water protection has gained considerable attention in the water resources literature particularly after several well publicized (non-First Nations) water contamination events in Canada. This short report explores health and place through an examination of access to safe drinking water in a developed country. For First Nations in Canada, safe drinking water remains a serious, albeit under-reported, problem. The incidence of contaminated drinking water is pervasive in many First Nations communities. Attempts to "fix" water quality problems using technology alone have produced only limited success. It will be shown that greater attention to source water protection has potential for both to improve drinking water quality as well as to re-connect health and place for First Nations in Canada.
This study is one of the first to examine the links connecting water insecurity, gender, and emotional distress. The article presents quantitative and qualitative analyses of interview data collected from randomly selected pairs of male and female household heads (n=48) living under the same household-level conditions of water insecurity., The results provide partial confirmation of past findings that women are more likely than men to be burdened with everyday water responsibilities. However, there were no significant differences between men's and women's experiences in household water emergencies (i.e., water shortages and last-ditch attempts to buy water) and reports on some measures of emotional distress (i.e., worry, annoyance, and anger with family members). The results suggest that intrahousehold gender disparities may be mitigated in times of severe water scarcity. The discussion raises questions about the comparability of men's and women's expressions of emotional distress.
Recent research suggests that insecure access to key resources is associated with negative mental health outcomes. Many of these studies focus on drought and famine in agricultural, pastoral, and foraging communities, and indicate that food insecurity mediates the link between water insecurity and emotional distress. The present study is the first to systematically examine intra-community patterns of water insecurity in an urban setting. In 2004-2005, we collected interview data from a random sample of 72 household heads in Villa Israel, a squatter settlement of Cochabamba, Bolivia. We examined the extent to which water-related emotional distress is linked with three dimensions of water insecurity: inadequate water supply; insufficient access to water distribution systems; and dependence on seasonal water sources, and with gender. We found that access to water distribution systems and female gender were significantly associated with emotional distress, while water supply and dependence on seasonal water sources were not. Economic assets, social assets, entitlements to water markets, and entitlements to reciprocal exchanges of water were significantly associated with emotional distress, while entitlements to a common-pool water resource institution were not. These results suggest that water-related emotional distress develops as a byproduct of the social and economic negotiations people employ to gain access to water distribution systems in the absence of clear procedures or established water rights rather than as a result of water scarcity per se.
- Melosi M. V
For these Americans, clean water is a luxury
- G Mcgraw
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Integrated public used microdata series: Version 7.0 [dataset
- S K G Ruggles
- R Goeken
- J Grover
- M Sobek