Optimizing rural drinking water supply infrastructure to account for spatial variations in groundwater quality and household welfare in coastal Bangladesh

Achieving water security requires reconciling multiple objectives while prioritizing scarce resources for the provision of safe drinking water supplies. We examine decision-making to invest in drinking water infrastructure in coastal Bangladesh where increasing saline intrusion in aquifers intersects with high levels of poverty for the 20 million people living in the coastal region. Multi-objective optimization is used to explore the trade-offs between two public policy goals: (a) maximizing overall access to improved water supplies (the greater good) and (b) maximizing access for the population with the lowest welfare (the greater need). To elucidate this trade-off, we make use of groundwater salinity measurements, an extensive household survey and an audit of drinking water infrastructure in 1 out of Bangladesh’s 139 polders, which is home to nearly 60,000 people. We quantify the costs of a variety of drinking water supply options including deep tube wells, desalination plants, and piped systems. The recommended solutions are sequences of investments in water supply assets that are optimized to specified locations within the polder. The method is potentially scalable and transferrable to inform investments to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal (Target 6.1) of universal access to safe and affordable drinking water