Public Concern about Water Safety, Weather, and Climate: Insights from the World Risk Poll

Abstract

Water safety refers to the quality of one's drinking water and whether it lacks dangerous contaminants. Limited access to safe water is projected to impact approximately 5 billion people worldwide by 2050. Climate change and worsening severe weather events pose increasing threats to global water safety. However, people may not perceive links between climate change and water safety, potentially undermining their willingness to implement behaviors that improve water safety. Existing studies on water safety risk perceptions have mostly been conducted in singlecountry contexts, which limits researchers' ability to make crossnational comparisons. Here, we assessed the extent to which people's severe weather concern and climate change concern predict their water safety concern. Our analyses used survey data from the 142-country 2019 Lloyd's Register Foundation World Risk Poll, including 21 low-income and 34 lower-middle-income countries. In mixed-effects models, severe weather concern was significantly more predictive of water safety concern than was climate change concern, although both resulted in positive associations. Worldwide, this finding was robust, insensitive to key model specifications and countries' varying protection against unsafe drinking water. We suggest communicators and policymakers improve messaging about water safety and other environmental threats by explaining how they are impacted by worsening severe weather.

Drinking Water Utility-Level Understanding of Climate Change Effects to System Reliability

“…This aligns with typical design activities, which are based on historical considerations. 1 Research has found that severe weather concerns are more predictive of water safety concerns than climate change concerns 65 and that adaptation efforts of wastewater utilities are motivated by improving resilience to past extreme events, not by addressing future climate change. 66 Use of historical events by participants to describe future risk could suggest a disconnect between risk awareness of current climate hazards and how future changes will affect those hazards.…”

Community perceptions and practices on quality and safety of drinking water in Mbarara city, south western Uganda

“…Yet, because most populations in urban areas cannot afford the expense of a treated water system and lack access to infrastructure, their sense of quality relies on modest water systems or various sources to supply their drinking water demands [29]. In addition, perceptions of worsening water quality have been observed all across the world, in both rich and developing nations, and 'Thousands have survived without love, not one without decent water quality [30]. It should be emphasized that the types, magnitudes, and extents of water quality concerns vary from country to country, and even from region to region within a country.…”