The final six chapters of the book examine how water is used in various contexts, from households to farms. Our goal is to understand how offstream water use is currently managed, while also examining emerging trends that might move us towards a more just and sustainable future. We explore questions related to water quantity (how can we decrease use and increase supply to alleviate scarcity?), water quality (how can we provide users with safe water and ensure that their use doesn’t contaminate water for others?), infrastructure (how well is our current water infrastructure working?), water governance (how are drinking water quality and wastewater discharges regulated?), and funding (how do we balance conservation incentives with affordability?).
Chapter 13 returns to our earlier theme of scarcity as a mismatch of supply and demand, examining potential supply-side solutions that might be less harmful than dams and aqueducts: desalination, wastewater reuse, water harvesting, and aquifer storage. Demand management does not appear in Chapter 13, but features prominently in later chapters.
Chapter 14 is the first of three chapters on household and urban water use, and focuses primarily on drinking-water quality, including a critical evaluation of water supply and sanitation systems in the US. Chapter 15 deals with urban water management issues, including water-supply reliability, water conservation, pricing, and stormwater management. Chapter 15 also explores the One Water concept, in which different urban water flows (drinking water, wastewater, stormwater, rainwater) are managed holistically to simultaneously alleviate scarcity, flooding, and pollution. Chapter 16 turns to low- and middle-income countries, exploring the successes and failures of the global development agenda around WASH (water, sanitation, and hygiene); we use the Sustainable Development Goals as our basic framework for this discussion.
Chapters 17 and 18 deal, respectively, with industrial and agricultural water management. In Chapter 17, we examine water quantity and quality issues associated with energy production, mining, and manufacturing, and turn a critical eye towards corporate water stewardship. Chapter 18 explores how the largest user of water—food production—affects water quantity and quality, and how better agricultural water management (and better diet choices) could help improve the sustainability and productivity of agriculture more broadly.