Socially vulnerable communities are affected by poor water quality: Study
Washington DC, US: A recent investigation into the connections between poor drinking water quality and social vulnerability in the United States, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters by IOP Publishing, shows that these violations disproportionately harm the most vulnerable populations.
About 70 per cent of the afflicted population fell into the group of highest social vulnerability, and numerous social factors other than wealth were connected to various drinking water quality breaches.
Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin's Jackson School of Geosciences led the study, which made use of updated definitions of socioeconomic vulnerability and disadvantaged neighbourhoods as well as new water quality data that represent actual water distribution rather than administrative boundaries.
In comparison to predictions made by the federal government's present environmental justice assessment tools, the upgraded model finds more than three times as many affected individuals.
While the majority of Americans have access to clean drinking water, between 2018 and 2020, one in ten of them was exposed to a health-based water quality violation. Due to an outdated and underfunded drinking water infrastructure, providing high-quality water in the United States is becoming more and more difficult.
Disinfectants and water treatment byproducts are the main contributors to health-based violations in community water systems, followed by naturally occurring contaminants (such as arsenic and radionuclides) and contaminants that are the result of human activity, like nitrates.
Previous research has been constrained in determining which communities and groups are most impacted by water violations due to data sets that are based on state and administrative boundaries that conceal the fact that water distribution occurs across international borders and by federal environmental justice assessment tools that have primarily focused on household income as an indicator of social vulnerability while potentially omitting important, data-available aspects of vulnerability.
Instead, data from community water systems across the nation were examined in this study in connection to the USVI, a better indicator of social vulnerability created using a tool from the Centres for Disease Control and informed by more recent research and data analytics.
According to proposed federal funds, each state must give disadvantaged communities (DACs) more than 49 per cent of the funding for drinking water infrastructure. However, as states have a lot of latitude in defining DACs, there are significant differences in definitions across the US. As mSVI catches three times more of the impacted population than household income alone, this study implies that a larger definition of DACs, beyond household income, should be taken into consideration.
Bridget Scanlon, Senior Research Scientist for The Bureau of Economic Geology at The University of Texas, said, "Our detailed analysis of the linkages of drinking water quality violations to social vulnerability can help inform guidance for effectively distributing infrastructure funding and designing interventions to ensure more equitable drinking water quality nationally.”
