An Assessment of Water Poverty Indices in the Context of Climate Change: A Study of Selected Climate Vulnerable Developing Countries

Water is one of the most critically stressed natural resources considering its expanding uses for economic activities, household demand and widespread misuses and mismanagement against a declining supply. The phenomenon of climate change, with clear changes in the trends and patterns of rainfall and temperature and their seasonal variability, has posed an additional blow to the severity of the water supply. In this context, water poverty index is considered to be useful for designing an integrated water management system for any country against climate change. It is a composite index that combines five water related components i.e. resource, access, capacity, use and environment with its seventeen sub-components to ensure that all the major water issues involving physical, social, economic and environmental aspects are included. The WPI score ranges between 0 and 100; a low score indicates water poverty and a high score indicates good water provision. For the present study, both water scarcity and climatic vulnerability have been considered and a total of sixteen low income and climatically vulnerable countries have been considered: Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Haiti, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Vietnam and Zimbabwe. The findings suggest that Indonesia scores the highest (61.34) and Sudan the lowest (24.65) among all the countries, while Bangladesh’s position (45.60) is fairly mild, which signifies that the country is not in a good position and there is a need to think about water management seriously against the looming climate change and water stress.JEL Code: I30, I31, I32, I38. I3