Water as a strategic natural resource is of fundamental importance for human development, prosperity, and poverty alleviation. Over the last three decades, Jordan's water resources have been severely degraded, threatening the livelihoods of countless people, particularly in rural and poor communities. The inadequate provision of water-related facilities has contributed to the rapid decline in quantity and degradation of quality in these communities. This study depicts the theoretical foundations and development of a water-focused and thematic indicator of poverty, which allow a comprehensive understanding of the crosscutting nature of water issues and impacts. It is with this in mind that a modified Water Poverty Index (mWPI) is developed herein to exemplify the utilization of the index, and to test its applicability and validity at the Jordanian governorate's level. The results show that water poverty fluctuates broadly between northern and southern regions suggesting a need for location-specific management plans and more targeted policy interventions. Overall, the mWPI, as a holistic tool, can assist decision-makers and other stakeholders in achieving sustainability and can be used to communicate the progress of sustainability to the wider community.
Combining the measure of water availability and the socio-economic capacity to access it gives new insights in the fields of water resources management and poverty alleviation. This approach lets researchers think about new multidimensional water scarcity indexes that have contributed to the definition of the water poverty index (WPI). The methodology first used for the calculation of this aggregate index was based on an equally weighted average of its five components (resources, capacity, access, use and environment). The main objective of this paper is to improve this procedure by using an objective weighting scheme. For this purpose we use principal component analysis to give more weight to components with larger variance and to discard components with very small ones. This improved WPI is applied in the case of Tunisia. We have obtained relevant results which could help policy makers to devise better policies to alleviate water poverty in the Inland region which was where the Tunisian revolution began.
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