Making scarcity “enough”: The hidden household costs of adapting to water scarcity in Mexico City

Abstract

In the face of water scarcity due to climate change and population growth, cities around the world, especially in the Global South, increasingly provide intermittent, rather than continuous, water supply. Because an intermittent water supply has negative effects on infrastructure and water quality, literature often recommends transition to continuous supply, but that transition may be unfeasible or cost-prohibitive for many cities. There are few policy recommendations for ensuring safe and equitable urban water accesswithinwater-scarce systems. By understanding how households bear the monetary and non-monetary costs of intermittency, we can make urban water safer, more sustainable, and more equitable. This study combines results from open-ended household interviews and ethnographic observations about water management (n = 59 households) with a large-N survey (n = 2,595 individuals) to understand how households experienced water scarcity in Mexico City. We found most residents reported satisfaction with the quantity of intermittent water supply but incurred monetary and non-monetary costs to achieve that satisfaction. We document the ways householdsadapted to scarcity, transforming the intermittent supply they received from the grid by storing, reusing, and conserving water. These adaptations “made scarcity enough,” allowing families to store and preserve sufficient water to meet their needs for waterquantity. However, these same adaptations simultaneously burdened households with financial costs, such as expenditures for storage, pumps, and alternative water sources, and non-monetary costs, such as time-intensive labor spent managing water and noticeable deterioration in drinking waterquality. Because the scarce public water supply is distributed unequally throughout the city, the financial, labor, and water quality impacts of adapting to scarcity were borne privately, primarily by marginalized households. Our findings about intermittency have implications for water justice and equity. We conclude with policy solutions that address the deterioration of water quality during household storage and the inequalities of intermittency.