A new paper by Thanti Octavianti and Chad Staddon, which critically examines the landscape of water security metrics, has been published by WIREs Water.
The authors identified 80 metrics to measure water security from a review of over 100 papers and found two dominant research clusters: “experiential scale‐based metrics and resource‐based metrics”.
They explain: “The former mainly focus on measuring the water experiences of households and its impact on human well‐being, while the majority of the latter assess freshwater availability or water resources security. We compare their approaches and the arguments used to develop them. We posit that the more local the scale and the more specific the water domain, the more meaningful results that the metrics can provide. Acknowledging the interrelationship between different water domains (e.g., water resources and water hazards) is important, but their aggregation for measurement may be problematic. We offer our views on future work in this field relating to topics beyond water, the need to conduct validation tests, and collaboration among academics and with other stakeholders.”
The full article is available here (open access).