Evaluating water security across scales: diagnostics and trends

Water security is a concept that accounts for multiple types of water-related risks and their societal impacts. It has proved to be a complex concept, which is difficult to frame and even more challenging to evaluate. This thesis aims to evaluate water security across scales and to begin to disentangle the concept’s complexity by looking at trends and relationships between water security indicators.
The foundation of this thesis is the development of a water security framing and diagnostic methodology. The framing is built upon previous water security framings and metrics. It is comprised of seven key categories of information or dimensions of water security: (1) drivers, (2) historical and cultural context, (3) the water resource system, (4) system performance, (5) outcomes, (6) actions, and (7) trends. These seven categories encapsulate a pragmatic view of water security, which is shaped by the possibility of obtaining meaningful metrics as well as by theoretical considerations. The diagnostic method used to assess water security and developed herein draws its inspiration from the medical field. The evaluation begins with an information gathering phase that entails a brief overview of the status and trends of the relevant data in order to develop an initial diagnosis.
This water security framing and diagnostic methodology are applied to a case study of Pakistan. A dashboard tool comprised of 52 indicators is developed to act as a visual aid for the case study. The dashboard’s utility is in its ability to consolidate information across five of the seven dimensions of water security and to aid in the first step of the diagnostic methodology: information gathering. This case study shows that a dashboard tool can be used to quickly highlight potential water security problems within a country. Four additional dashboards are generated for Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan in order to conduct a regional comparative analysis allowing for the provisional detection of patterns between indicators.
One of the flaws in a national water security assessment is the inability to account for sub-national heterogeneity. Therefore, following the country analysis, a multiscale water security analysis is conducted, with the United States serving as a case study. This analysis generates a water security index at the state and county levels. This index is created based on the system performance and outcome dimensions of the overall water security framing to highlight areas of water insecurity. This study demonstrates how larger scales of analysis can conceal areas of water insecurity, whilst also providing a systematic methodology to compare water security across administrative boundaries.
The final section of this thesis examines indicator trends and relationships to begin to better understand the relationships between water security indicators. Trend analysis and econometric methods are used to empirically test the relationship between water productivity and water stress using 166 countries. A negative relationship is found between the two indicators. In addition, potential drivers of water stress are analysed. It is found that the relationships between indicators vary when looking at changes within a country versus looking at the relationships across countries. Within a country, water stress is associated with water productivity, population, cultivated land area, and political stability, whereas gross domestic product (GDP) and precipitation are related to variations of stress across countries.
The findings of this thesis, as well as the developed methods and tools, have the ability to impact academic audiences and policymakers. This study expands upon the academic literature by developing an updated framing and a diagnostic methodology. The dashboard tool and systematic creation of a sub-national water security index highlight key water security challenges and hotspots that can be used by policymakers across scales to inform potential interventions. The thesis also sheds light on relationships between water security indicators. Ultimately, this thesis develops novel ways to evaluate water security, advances the discussion around the concept, and can help to focus future water security analyses.

Keywords: diagnostic method
water productivity
water stress
water security
composite indicator
spatial heterogeneity
Advisor: Hall, J