Publication Highlight: Socio-hydrological drought impacts on urban water affordability
Water providers are often faced with the options of investing in additional water supplies or implementing expensive emergency measures to counteract reductions in water availability arising from droughts. The costs associated with implementing these options are frequently passed on to households by way of increased billing rates and surcharges. However, increasing water bills can challenge urban water security for low-income households and alter patterns of water consumption across household income-level groups.
In a recently published Nature Water article, Dr. Benjamin Rachunok (former postdoctoral researcher in the Fletcher Lab) and Dr. Sarah Fletcher developed a socio-hydrological modeling approach that integrates hydrology, water infrastructure, utility decision-making and household behavior to better understand the impacts of droughts on household-level water affordability. They apply their modeling approach to the case study of Santa Cruz which was previously impacted by the 2011-2016 drought in California.
Their findings suggest that many drought resilience strategies enacted by utilities disproportionately increase water bills for low income households while lowering bills for high-income households. Furthermore, low-income household groups are found to be more vulnerable to plausible changes in future drought characteristics and sunk costs attributed to ultimately unnecessary, proactive investments in water supply infrastructure capacity expansion.