Ask someone in Flint, Michigan, or São Paolo, Brazil — the list of cities rocked by water disasters seems to grow each day — how much safe clean water is worth. Worried about contamination and drought, it might be a pretty penny. But the ability of people to actually pay for the full cost of water — from protecting it at its source to getting it to flow from the tap — depends, as it does with anything for sale, on income. And yet water isn’t simply a commodity; it’s necessary for life, so the ethics and practicalities of how society pays for clean water quickly become tricky. The truth is that our growing income inequality means growing thirst and disease.
Treating and delivering water and sanitizing effluent is not cheap, and the cost of providing safe drinking water continues to climb, fueled dramatically by crumbling infrastructure, unpredictable weather and the need to reach deeper into watersheds for safe water. Daily management and regulatory failures are also to blame. In Flint, a change of water sources caused lead to leach into drinking water. In Atlanta, where services had been privatized, quality spiraled downward, leading eventually to the city’s decision to re-municipalize water services.
Meanwhile, in the US — and all over the world — public money for water services has been drying up. Policy-makers and water utility managers are increasingly reaching into constituents’ and customers’ wallets to cover increasing costs. While such a “full-cost recovery” philosophy seems to make sense in theory based on simple arithmetic — a utility should recover all costs associated with operations — and would seem to ensure fiscal discipline as it encourages conservation (i.e., when customers pay real water costs, they use less), the practice doesn’t take into account the fact that the UN General Assembly has said affordable water is a human right. Countries such as Ecuador and South Africa have even enshrined the right in their constitutions — although implementation…