Abstract
Unchecked consumption, extraction, and growth have resulted in severe damage to ecological systems. Fresh water issues constitute one of the great challenges for political ecologists. On the one hand, there is a human health and development crisis and over 700 million people still lack access to clean, safe drinking water. On the other hand, there is a growing environmental water crisis regarding water scarcity, water stress, and freshwater resource depletion. This analysis utilizes metabolic rift theory to demonstrate the disruptive consequences that human development and agriculture have on the water cycle. I use two-way fixed effects longitudinal regression for 176 nations from 1970-2015 to test how agriculture, capital, international aid, governance, and civil society are associated with two important water indicators: access to water and water stress. I find that agriculture is associated with higher levels of water stress and higher levels of water access. Higher GDP per capita and international aid increase water access but have no significant relationship with water stress. Additionally, international non-governmental organizations and environmental treaty ratifications are associated with decreased water stress, but also decreased water access. Therefore, I find that the disruptive processes of capital and development have differential impacts on these two interrelated water outcomes. This political ecological analysis suggests that simple solutions that address water access or water stress alone, without considering the interrelated aspects of global water issues, may inadvertently influence other facets of the world's growing water concerns. Furthermore, agriculture and development create an ever-growing metabolic rift in the processes that allow fresh water to replenish itself, leading to future global issues of water access and stress.
Highlights
Water issues are some of the world's most pressing problems
The findings show that agriculture, processes related to international development, and even past solutions to the water crises have differential impacts on water access and water stress
For each 1-point increase in political and civil liberties there is an associated .65% increase in access levels. These findings suggest that the responsibility to respond to the demands of populations is associated with better water justice and possibly with better functioning of the human-water cycle metabolism
Summary
Water issues are some of the world's most pressing problems. The World Economic Forum has ranked water issues among the top five global risks for the past nine years (World Economic Forum, 2020). We are currently extracting groundwater at rates far surpassing the speed of replenishment, and over-withdrawing surface water to such a degree that many rivers and lakes are shrinking or drying completely (Barlow, 2014; Black and King, 2009). These processes lead to increased water stress and an unsustainable future. While development and capital flows have helped to increase levels of water access over the last three decades, the disruption of the water cycle through over-withdrawal will make connecting the remaining populations to water sources and maintaining current levels of access increasingly difficult (Mekonnen and Hoekstra, 2011)
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