Water Security Assessment Indicators: The Rural Context

An increasing number of factors pose challenges to the development and management of water resources in rural, remote, or otherwise marginalized (RRM) communities. Indicators and indices have been developed for evaluation, prioritization, and decision-making at local and supra-local scales. Indicators and indices are useful assessment tools as they simplify the modeling process and provide results in an accessible format. The purpose of this paper is to consolidate a list of indicators (n = 176) from a review of community-and basin-level indices and a selection of other literature within a water security framework for RRM communities. A detailed discussion of each of the six dimensions within the framework is provided. This paper concludes with some general remarks on the standards used for evaluation, the reliance upon historical and field data, suggestions for improving the descriptive clarity where it is lacking, and the prospect of these indicators getting used by community members.