Beyond Scarcity: Capturing Human Experiences with the Global Water Crisis
Sera Young, co-lead of the Making Water Insecurity Visible Global Working Group, visits with Kajiado county water officials in Kenya to learn about ongoing water issues. Credit: Simon Thuo/Northwestern Institute for Policy Research
Water problems threaten the well-being and sustainable development of communities worldwide. The Making Water Insecurity Visible Global Working Group is translating data into real-world action to remedy water injustices.
In the last half-century, the increasing frequency and severity of water insecurity have become a global water crisis. Freshwater sources are under severe strain, either drying up or becoming too polluted to use. Agriculture, the most water-intensive industry, continues to exacerbate this stress through widespread inefficiencies, while climate change is intensifying the problem by altering weather and water patterns worldwide, bringing about droughts in some areas and devastating floods in others. Even in higher-income countries, inadequate water infrastructure can lead to tap water avoidance, imposing the costs of bottled water and filtration devices on the economically disadvantaged individuals who are most often affected.
Today, nearly two billion people lack access to clean and reliable water sources. The World Meteorological Organization’s projections suggest that two-thirds of the world's population will face at least one month of water shortages each year by 2050.
Current global water indicators focus on measures of water issues that are easy to directly observe, like whether a household has piped water or if people live near a well or spring. But for communities around the world, these measures fail to capture how water insecurity impacts people in their daily lives, from the food they eat to the clothes they wear to the dignity or shame they feel.
How much time did people spend collecting water or worrying about water availability? Did interruptions in water access change whether they could do regular activities like laundry, bathing, or washing their hands? Traditional metrics of water insecurity did not capture these experiences of how water “shows up” in people’s lives. Because of that, their voices were missing from water policy discussions. This led Sera Young, Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, to develop the Water Insecurity Experiences (WISE) Scales—simple survey tools that capture human experiences with water insecurity, such as whether people are worried about not having enough water, or how often they change what they eat because of problems with water.
By quantifying the extent to which people encounter issues with accessing and using water, the WISE Scales offer vital insights into how water stress impacts people’s daily activities, health and wellbeing. For example, in 2022, an Aboriginal community organization in Walgett, Australia and the University of New South Wales in Sydney partnered to use the WISE Scales to survey the town. They found that water insecurity among residents—46% were moderate to severely water insecure—was far worse than the national average of 1%. These WISE data enabled community leaders in Walgett to get the attention of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, who featured Walgett in the 7:30 nightly news broadcast. This, in turn, helped them to successfully advocate to the Ministry of Water to change the town’s water source.
Since Young’s team developed the WISE Scales, these survey tools have been used by over 100 organizations in 55 countries as well as international organizations like the World Bank and UNICEF. Young now co-leads the Making Water Insecurity Visible Global Working Group at the Buffett Institute alongside Julius Lucks, Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering. A husband-wife team, the two joined Northwestern in 2016, where they began tackling water issues from distinct disciplinary perspectives. As a synthetic biology expert, Lucks researches water at the molecular level, examining its quality and how to detect and reduce potential contamination.
“There is a massive awareness issue related to water quality, but synthetic biology technologies can help people visualize water contaminants that were previously unseeable,” Lucks said. “These technologies could drive massive progress on all these big-picture goals to improve people’s water quality-related knowledge, behaviors and health.”
Julius Lucks tests water in the field in Paradise, California, following the catastrophic wildfire in 2018. Credit: Julius Lucks/Northwestern University
While Lucks examines water insecurity from a molecular level, Young explores water insecurity at a societal level. Together, their working group at the Buffett Institute conducts social science research on water insecurity experiences, engineers water quality testing and remediation solutions, and translates all of these data into action. The group’s members span the United States, Mexico and Kenya and their expertise ranges across nearly a dozen disciplines, including chemistry, environmental engineering, statistics, law, global health and more. By uniting researchers and leaders of nongovernmental organizations, they are producing new data illuminating issues of water scarcity and quality, and they are working with policymakers and communities to help them leverage the data for change.
“We're getting people to think about water differently,” said Young. “We’re helping people to think about and measure things that are hidden. Water quality is hard to see, and experiences with water are hard to see...we're democratizing knowledge about water security, water safety and water access.”
"If you can empower people with information about their water quality, they can solve the issue locally, and they can take action and fight for broader scale solutions,” Lucks added. “The goal of the project is to make information about water insecurity and water quality accessible so that people and policymakers can take action and figure out if they're on the right track toward addressing problems that were previously obscured.”
Locally, Lucks and Young are leading a groundbreaking collaboration among social scientists, synthetic biologists and public health experts to develop water quality tests for household use. With a $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation, they’ve developed handheld devices that 350 households in the Chicago area will be using to test their tap water for contaminants. These devices use biosensors that can rapidly detect lead or copper in household water from a single-drop sample—a new technology that was developed in the Lucks Laboratory at Northwestern.
Water samples within the device glow green when a contaminent is detected. Credit: Julius Lucks/Northwestern University
“These tests do this by offering the same certainty and simplicity found in at-home COVID-19 and pregnancy tests,” Young said. “We hope that families and organizations can use the tests in their daily activities to understand where the problems are in Chicago and that policymakers can take action based on the information they generate.”
During the pilot study, the team will also distribute first-of-its-kind, at-home water quality tests for per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), also known as “forever chemicals.” Even a small amount of PFAS exposure can cause adverse health effects, including developmental delays, decreased fertility, increased cancer risks and lowered immunity to infection.
In early 2024, the group and their collaborators distributed lead tests as part of the study's first phase. They will distribute copper tests during the second and third years of the study and then roll out PFAS test kits from the lab of group member William Dichtel, Robert L. Letsinger Professor of Chemistry at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.
“Once we roll these out to Chicago communities and people see what's possible, we plan to help generate a community-level response and incorporation of these technologies into their strategies for informing how to identify which lead lines get replaced first,” Lucks said. “It’ll be interesting to see the many ways that these issues are approached with the information we can generate now.”
The group is also fostering new approaches to issues of water insecurity internationally. In spring 2023, members of the group, including Young and Pablo Gaitán Rossi, Director of Universidad Iberoamericana’s Research Institute for Equitable Development (EQUIDE), led meetings in Mexico City with more than 60 leaders from 40 governments across North and South America to discuss how measuring water insecurity can improve public health.
More than 60 representatives of organizations including the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Food Program gathered in Mexico City to discuss how better measurement of food and water insecurity can lead to global progress in public health. Credit: Universidad Iberoamericana
Following this convening, policymakers in Nuevo León, Mexico committed to building the WISE Scales into regular surveys of vulnerable populations in their state—effectively creating a playbook for other government entities in Mexico and around the world to follow. Together, Young and Gaitán Rossi have since launched the Water Insecurity Experiences Network of Latin America and the Caribbean (WISE-LAC), a federation of researchers, policymakers and practitioners committed to improving water insecurity in the region.
With data from more than 40 countries, Young and her collaborators have also created the first-ever picture of how water insecurity experiences and extreme climate events are related. “If climate change is a shark, then water is its teeth,” Young said while giving a talk at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature Pavilion at the United Nations’ 2023 climate change conference, COP28. “What we can see for the very first time is that climate events and water insecurity really go hand-in-hand.”
As new initiatives emerge from the group, the Buffett Institute is helping the group amplify its research at major conferences and mobilize policymakers toward action.
(From left to right: Allison Carlson, Executive Vice President of Analytics at Foreign Policy; Annalise Blum, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Water and Science at the U.S. Department of the Interior; Sera Young, Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University; and Janti Soeripto, CEO and President of Save the Children U.S.) At the 2023 Foreign Policy Climate Summit, Young shared insights into the WISE Scales and their impact during a panel discussion on strategies for strengthening water insecurity. Credit: Foreign Policy
As a hub for cutting-edge international scholarship across disciplines, the Buffett Institute fosters seemingly unlikely connections like those happening within the Making Water Insecurity Visible Global Working Group, expanding possibilities for collaborative research and its impact.
“We have to make an effort to translate our work to each other, but that becomes rewarding because now, one of our members is framing synthetic biology technology in a way that lawmakers can understand,” Young said. “I don't know of any other synthetic biology centers with such an active social science component; this diversity of perspectives has really given us an edge.”
The group now aims to improve the tools used to track progress toward United Nations Sustainable Development Goal #6—universal access to safe water, sanitation and hygiene—and has made significant strides. In conjunction with World Water Day 2024, the World Health Organization and UNICEF recommended the WISE Scales as a priority indicator for the SDG 6, and Young collaborated with the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Gallup to release WISE Scales data from over 40 countries, a major first step in developing a WISE Scales database that represents all nations.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies hosted a webinar for the release of the report “Living the Global Water Crisis: How the World Experiences Water Insecurity” in March 2024.
"Right now, water is under-invested in because we don't see many of the problems people face. Without seeing the extent of the problem, people don't take action,” Young said. “We want to bring more attention to water issues so that the investment and the political will are there.”