Journal
WATER
Volume 14, Issue 17, Pages -Publisher
MDPI
DOI: 10.3390/w14172691
Keywords
water access; multidimensional poverty; Shapley-Owen method; regression; communities; vulnerability
Categories
Funding
- Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) through BoliviaWATCH Program [11972]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
This study examines the link between water access and poverty in developing countries, as well as the impact of mining activities on ecological flows and water quality. The results show that mining can provide an alternative source of income for households in remote rural areas, but it also poses risks to water quality and public health.
In developing countries, where economic expansion depends on extractive activities such as agriculture and mining, water quantity and quality considerations need to be examined in tandem with GDP growth and poverty reduction efforts. Poorest households in the Tupiza watershed in Bolivia are located in rural areas where water access for irrigation and safe drinking water is becoming increasingly scarce. Small-scale unregulated mining offers an alternative for revenue making in rural households, although wastewater from industry threatens water quality and new technologies to reduce water pollution are not implemented in this region yet. This study analyses water access and poverty linkages using the Multidimensional Poverty Analysis (MDPA) framework from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) to guide a survey and to develop indicators using the Shapley-Owen decomposition method and multivariate regressions. A set of household-level policies were included to predict the influence of these policies on poverty reduction estimates. Results have shown that remote communities in rural areas have the lowest value of multidimensional poverty and for some of these communities mining activities represent an alternative that could be considered if their water access conditions worsen over time. While mining can bring better monetary benefits, it can cause the degradation of ecological flows from the produced wastewater. Under the current technologies and processes, it can pose negative impacts on water quality and threatens the public health of these communities.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available