Urban Household Water Insecurity from the Margins: Perspectives from Northeast Brazil

Abstract

Urban water security strategies commonly pivot around supply-side initiatives to mitigate scarcity, forecasted population growth, or anticipated climate change; yet, scholars have begun to expand urban water security scholarship by including alternative frameworks that incorporate equity into the analysis. Our study seeks to contribute to this equity turn by opening the investigative aperture on urban water security research in several aspects. We address the question of water security for whom, and turn our attention to the urban resident and household. We shift empirical focus to smaller urban centers in the Global South, and we develop a new assessment tool for water insecurity, the Household Water Insecurity Index (HWISI), to assess differences across the urban waterscape. We conducted this research in Forquilha (Ceará, Brazil), which represents an overlooked class of small urban centers common across Brazil’s semiarid region. We draw on qualitative and quantitative data to describe household water insecurity using the HWISI. The prevalence of household water insecurity is variable, with a quarter of the population experiencing moderate to severe household water insecurity. In addition, analysis of the factors within the HWISI demonstrated how specific water insecurity domains push households across water insecurity thresholds.