Dr Madelaine Moore
The global water crisis: a crisis of what? For whom? Where?
Collectively, we face a global water crisis, whether that is because there is too much, too little or the water available is too polluted. Over 40% of the world already living in water insecure areas, and this number is set to grow. As a result, the terrains in and around water governance are rapidly changing. Within international fora – such as the 2023 UN conference on Water, the first UN conference on water in over 50 years – the global water crisis is increasingly approached as a crisis of financing. For water insecure communities, it is a crisis of historical and future mismanagement, for ecosystems it is a crisis of survival. Water is predominantly managed at highly localised scales, needing to respond to place-based problems, yet the discourse of the global water crisis is increasingly global, raising questions of scale, place and abstraction. Water is a flow resource, and while concepts such as the hydrosocial cycle and waterscapes attend to its socio-political materiality and the ways in which it both reflects and exacerbates existing socio-political relations and inequalities, the question of what is in crisis (water, eco-systems, governance regimes…) and how crisis at different points in the hydro-social cycle might flow into or re-mould other points is not fully addressed. This talk will explore how the global water crisis has been constructed, asking what is in crisis? For whom? And why?
