Households’ equal access to clean and plentiful water supplies may be due as much, if not more, to sustainable development practices as to socio-economic factors, the research suggests.
A team of UK and US academics surveyed more than 7,600 households in 22 low- and middle-income countries to assess inequality in household water security and the factors that influence it.
Writing in the journal Nature Communications, the researchers suggest that this inequality mimics the so-called “Kuznets curve” used to describe patterns of economic development.
In the economic field, the Kuznets curve makes the assumption that during economic development, the action of the markets increases economic inequalities at first before these then decrease over time.
Similarly, the environmental Kuznets curve, developed in the 1990s, replaces economic inequality in favor of environmental pollution as the dependent variable.
Similarly, say scientists from the universities of Cardiff and Birmingham working with colleagues from the universities of North Carolina and the Midwest in the United States, using water inequality as the dependent variable, it can be shown that the inequality first increases and then decreases.
While economic inequality and environmental pollution are assumed to depend on growth, the researchers argue in the paper that “non-economic factors such as levels of sustainable development may also be able to indicate or alter distribution of resources and services”.
Lead author of the research, Dr Feng Mao from Cardiff University, commented: “This research extends the conventional concept of the Kuznets curve and encourages a more general rethinking of development beyond economic terms.
With water security and equal access recognized by the United Nations as a human right, Professor of Hydrology at the UNESCO Chair in Water Sciences David Hannah said of the research that it would have “practical implications for understanding and acting on water security to achieve fairer, more inclusive and sustainable water development for all.
