Water – with it life flows. But poor management and a changing climate have contaminated and stressed water supplies, harming communities and ecosystems. Stanford researchers work across the globe to understand the far-reaching value water provides people, and how better management is key to tapping its full potential.
Promoting Equality
A study in rural Zambia found installing piped water near homes promotes gender equality and improves well-being. Evaluating data from GPS tracking devices, water meters and household surveys, researches found households with access to piped water spent 80% less time fetching water, accruing a savings of close to four hours per week, or almost 200 hours per year. The vast majority of these benefits went to women and girls who used the saved time for gardening, household chores, caring for children and selling products. Households were also more likely to plant gardens and grow a larger variety of crops - which they ate and sold - promoting both food security and income. The research could spur governments and NGOs to more carefully evaluate the costs and benefits of piped water as an alternative to communal water sources.
Improving Health
An automatic chlorine doser developed by the Stanford-led Lotus Water Project, offers a safe, inexpensive and reliable solution for the roughly one billion people using piped water systems failing to meet international safety standards. The device treats water at the point of collection, has no moving parts and doesn't require electricity. The team completed successful pilots testing household demand and willingness to pay for the doser and also found areas using it had a 25% reduction of diarrheal illness in children. The device has potential for widespread adoption and improved public health, especially because it doesn't change how people collect water or the amount of time it takes.
Guiding Community Resilience
A recent study is the first to demonstrate how real estate data platforms can provide valuable water use insights for city housing and infrastructure planning, drought management and sustainability. Using housing information from Zillow with census and water use data, the researchers applied machine learning methods to identify residential water consumption based on housing characteristics. The study reveals insight into water-efficient communities and lays the framework for integrating big data into urban planning, providing more accurate water use expectations for different community configurations. With up to 68% of the world’s population residing in urban or suburban areas by 2050, the research promises to help evolve development patterns which could hold the key to a more water-wise, water secure future.
Supporting Food Security
Employing airborne electromagnetic surveys, researchers are mapping underground rock and sediment formations that control water movement below the surface. The project is investigating where water from the Sierra Nevada Mountains could recharge groundwater aquifers in California’s Central Valley by identifying recharge zones. The region - which the nation relies on for a quarter of its overall food - struggles to balance climate impacts with increased agricultural pressures leading to groundwater overpumping, sinking land and water contamination. The maps could inform water withdrawal limits and recharge by pinpointing optimal locations for flood water redirection.
Boosting Prosperity
A new project in sub-Saharan Africa aims to amplify the poverty-alleviating impacts of infrastructure investments, such as water systems and roads. Households in sub-Saharan Africa are particularly vulnerable to changing temperature and rain patterns as they often rely on smallholder farming for survival. Irrigation has been shown to improve households’ abilities to cultivate crops in the dry season, withstand droughts and grow more water-intensive and high-value crops. These impacts increase food and income security, and ultimately the ability to escape poverty. The researchers seeks to understand how water infrastructure helps households transition out of poverty, and how these relationships could change with extreme weather events. The findings could guide governments in building targeted road, irrigation and water supply infrastructure to benefit low-income households.
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