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Water, Crime and Security in the Twenty-First Century pp 53–90Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Too Little: Water and Access

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Part of the book series: Critical Criminological Perspectives ((CCRP))

Abstract

The biosphere of planet Earth can be described as ‘a seamless continuum’ comprised of the interacting elements of water, soil, air and living organisms. This is the system that sustains and reproduces life and, as Everard (2013: 28) points out, the depth of the interdependence of these constituent parts is ‘exemplified by the water cycle’:

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Fonjong and Fokum (2017: 489) offer even more pronounced figures—predicting an increase from 3.3 billion people to 6.4 billion in 2050—an addition of 3.1 billion. With much of this growth anticipated to take place in peri-urban and informal settlements, providing water to these places will be especially challenging.

    As McDonald and colleagues (2014: 96–97) explain, ‘as cities grow in population, the total water needed for adequate municipal supply grows as well.... This increase in total municipal water demand is driven not just by the increase in urban population, but also by a tendency for economic development to increase the fraction of the urban population that uses municipal supply rather than other sources such as local wells or private water vendors.... Cities by their nature spatially concentrate the water demands of thousands or millions of people into a small area, which by itself would increase stress on finite supplies of available freshwater near the city center.... ’ (internal citations omitted).

  2. 2.

    As Beltrán and Velázquez (2015: 1022) explain, ‘[t]he concept of virtual water (VW) was defined by Allan (1993) as the water “contained” in a product, understood not only as the physical amount actually within the product, but as the amount of water required to generate it. Thus defined, VW became a physical indicator of the water required for the production of a good or service’ (emphasis in original). Beltrán and Velázquez (2015: 1022) distinguish the concept of VW from the concept of ‘water footprint’ (WF), which refers to ‘“volume of water needed for the production of goods and services consumed by the inhabitants of the country.” It was defined as an “indicator of water use in relation to consumption of people” (Chapagain and Hoekstra 2004: 11)’. Posing the question ‘what does virtual water hide?’, Beltrán and Velázquez (2015: 1023, 1033) argue that ‘most analyses of VW flows are undertaken from a quantitative perspective that does not take into account the fact that VW flows are a physical manifestation of institutional, political and social processes that both coexist with the flows and affect them (Beltrán 2012)’ and that ‘VW, despite being a potent biophysical indicator that sheds light on the water flows involved in production processes, does not challenge the market logic and the neoclassical (ir)rationality of international trade’.

  3. 3.

    Globally, ‘[a]griculture is the largest user of water (70%), followed by industry (20%) and individuals (10%)’ (Millay 2016). How much water an individual consumes may depend on an individual’s financial means. Kimmelman (2017), for example, notes that poor people in Mexico City may spend more than 10 per cent of their income on water—enough to yield approximately 10 gallons per person per day—but that wealthier residents of the city may consume 100 gallons per person per day while paying one-tenth of the cost. In other situations, individual consumption may be a reflection of the choices he/she makes with respect to food. Most people drink between two and four litres of water per day; depending on their diets, they may ‘eat[] 2,000-5,000 liters of virtual water in the food they consume’ (Millay 2016). On the concept of ‘virtual water’, see endnote 2.

    It bears mention, though, that in some regions of the world (such as the western United States), agricultural lands have been converted to suburban, exurban, and resort developments in response to population growth and in-migration, which, in turn, have threatened the integrity of locally managed irrigation systems (see Baker et al. 2014).

  4. 4.

    Note that in different regions of the world, the percentage may be higher or lower. Lafreniere and colleagues (2015: 424, 425) point out that ‘irrigators control 80% of all water entitlements in many water-scarce regions in the world (Perry 2001)’ and that in Alberta, Canada, ‘irrigation accounts for 71% of the province’s surface water use’ (Bjornlund et al. 2007).

  5. 5.

    Arnold (2009: 803, 804) notes, however, that ‘the primary premise of water privatization—that it produces more efficient water system operations than the public sector can provide—is questionable.... [P]rivate water companies have little incentive to invest in public water systems’ improvements or maintenance activities that will produce benefits beyond the end of the privatization contract’s term. As a result, privatization may not solve the long-term update and maintenance problems of public entities, which may receive their systems back from private operators in surprisingly serious need of immediate public investment. Furthermore, motivated by cost reduction goals, private water companies may fail to consider impacts on the natural environment, including watershed ecosystem services, instream flows, and aquifer health, when seeking inexpensive sources of water, shifting those environmental costs to society as a whole’ (footnotes omitted). We return to the issue of water privatization in Chapter 5.

  6. 6.

    In many respects, then, fast-growing cities in the United States are beginning to encounter problems similar to those in the Global South. Benton-Short and Short (2013: 306) and others (see generally Butts and Bankus 2013: 156; Valdez 2016; Whatley and Lerer 2015) observe that many cities in the developing world have fallen behind in constructing, maintaining and properly managing water supply and water treatment systems. Many such cities have also lacked the necessary financial, technical or managerial capacities to deal with the implications of rapid population growth on water supplies that, in many instances, were already inadequate (Benton-Short and Short 2013; 306; see generally BBC News 2015; Faysse et al. 2014: 250; Simon Romero 2015; Ross 2015; Taylor and Sonnenfeld 2017).

  7. 7.

    As Wines (2015: A1) points out, ‘[d]rought’s grip on California grabs all the headlines. But from Texas to Arizona to Colorado, the entire West is under siege by changing weather patterns that have shrunk snowpacks, raised temperatures, spurred evaporation and reduced reservoirs to record lows’. For more on drought-stricken western states, including but not limited to California, and the ways in which shrinking water resources have affected interstate diplomacy, see, e.g., Acuna and Burke (2015), Alvarez (2015), Arnold (2009), Barragan (2015a, b), Bernstein (2015), Boxall and Harper (2014), DiBenedetto (2015), Diffenbaugh (2017), Egan (2017), El Nasser (2015), Evans (2014), Fears (2016), Fountain (2016a, b), Gelineau and Knickmeyer (2015), Kahn and Snider (2015), Kaplan (2015), Lustgarten (2016), McElwee (2015), McPhate (2017), McPhate and Bidgood (2017), Melley (2015), Mulkern (2015a, b), Opar (2014, 2016), Parker (2015), Pierce (2016), Reilly (2015), Reuters (2015), Robinson (2015), Rogers (2016), Ezra David Romero (2015), Smith (2015), Standen (2015), Takepart.com (2015), Totten (2015), Vedantam (2015), Wines (2015), cf. Brauman (2016).

    While drought tends to be one of the more ‘visible’ environmental problems, it is worth noting that Donald J. Trump, as the Republican nominee for President of the United States, called California’s drought a ‘myth propagated by environmentalists’ (Homas 2016). (Of course, on the campaign trail, Trump also promised voters that he would ensure that all Americans had access to ‘crystal clear water’ (quoted in Moor (2017: 13)).)

  8. 8.

    Fort Bragg is not alone in its willingness to sacrifice long-term water conservation for short-term needs (see, e.g., Alvarez 2015). Fortunately, in Brazil, public schools adopted a more erudite approach during their drought, changing their menus to serve sandwiches instead of meals on disposable plates or plates that needed to be washed (Simon Romero 2015).

  9. 9.

    Of course, water theft may occur even if scarcity is not a concern. Greiner and colleagues (2016: 27) found in their study of agricultural water users in Queensland, Australia, that the ‘[u]nauthorized (or unlawful) taking of surface or groundwater, i.e., taking water in excess of license conditions ’— ‘an act of non-compliance with water resource legislation’, occurred during a period of above-average rainfall, repeated flooding, and the wettest 24-month period on record.

  10. 10.

    Though California’s drought emergency is now over, Lendof and Klausner (2017) report that ‘[a]reas of the state still have extremely low groundwater supplies and climate change makes drought a future possibility’. Moreover, as Kate Poole, senior attorney and Water and Wildlife Project director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, pointed out in April 2017 after the wet winter of 2017 and after Jerry Brown, Governor of California, declared an end to the drought, ‘[w]ater may appear to be in abundance right now. But even after this unusually wet season, there won’t be enough water to satisfy all the demands of agriculture, business and cities, without draining our rivers and groundwater basins below sustainable levels’ (quoted in Sim 2017). Similarly, Noah S. Diffenbaugh (2017), the Kimmelman Family Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and a Professor of Earth System Science at Stanford University cautions, ‘this extremely wet winter will not wash away the drought. Depending where one looks, California lost out on one to three full years of precipitation from 2012 to 2016. That is a lot of water to make up in one year, and as of last week almost half of California was still in a state of drought. The moisture deficits that have accumulated during the drought have not been seen in our lifetimes. They have caused thousands of California residents to go without running water, resulted in groundwater contamination and permanent loss of aquifer storage capacity, and have severely stressed tens of millions of trees. As a result, even after this wet year, rural communities, groundwater aquifers and forest ecosystems will still feel the effects of the drought’.

  11. 11.

    The perception that water theft is ‘petty’ is not limited to Kenya. Greiner and colleagues (2016), in a study of irrigation water users in Queensland, Australia, found that some may take water in excess of licence conditions in order to maximize business profitability, and that non-compliance is underpinned by the perception of low probability of successful prosecution and a relatively small financial penalty in the case of conviction.

  12. 12.

    Deforestation in the Amazon River basin has reduced its capacity to release humidity into the air, diminishing rainfall in southeast Brazil and adding to São Paulo’s water crisis (Simon Romero 2015).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Justice Studies College of Justice and Safety, Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond, KY, USA

    Avi Brisman & Bill McClanahan

  2. School of Justice Faculty of Law, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

    Avi Brisman, Nigel South & Reece Walters

  3. Newcastle Law School Faculty of Business and Law, University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW, Australia

    Avi Brisman

  4. Department of Sociology, University of Essex, Colchester, Essex, UK

    Nigel South

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  1. Avi Brisman
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Brisman, A., McClanahan, B., South, N., Walters, R. (2018). Too Little: Water and Access. In: Water, Crime and Security in the Twenty-First Century. Critical Criminological Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52986-2_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52986-2_3

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