Water scarcity and abundance, water productivity and their relation to poverty - Water Scarcity, Livelihoods and Food Security - page 33

as a general rule increased WP tends to accompany increased land productivity,
and both require plant types that can yield well under favorable conditions as
well as tolerating unfavorable conditions.
As understanding accumulated during the currency of the CPWF, it recog-
nized that factors other than WP itself were more important to livelihoods and
food security, especially of the poor. It concluded that WP was a useful
indicator for some purposes, but was not the critically important factor that it
was assumed to be when the CPWF was initiated. The CPWF broadened its
agenda to focus on development challenges in basins related to water. It came
to see that addressing water scarcity was a means of helping achieve broader
development goals, including reducing poverty, rather than an end in itself.
The change is an example of how learning helped the CPWF to grow and
evolve, adjusting its priorities and research questions as its understanding of
the issues improved.
Water, poverty and water poverty
Kemp-Benedict et al. (2012) summarized the variables used to estimate
poverty in the BFP's ten basins. Water scarcity was not strongly correlated with
poverty, which highlights the danger of assuming that there is a simple
association between water availability and poverty. Other variables that do
explain variations in poverty are those responsible for basic livelihood support,
including access to water, protection from hazards such as drought and flood,
and the ability to produce increased amounts of high-quality food.
Evidence suggests that poverty is more dependent on the stage of develop-
ment of the basin's economy (Cook et al., 2012). At their least-developed
phase, populations in basins are low in proportion to the resources available. In
this case, poverty is more strongly related to the absence of basic services such
as safe water, sanitation, health care, education, finance, markets or farming
inputs. Pressure on resources increases as a basin's economy develops during
the transitional phase, so that both scarcity of and access to water become
important. As economies move toward industrialization, these deficiencies are
corrected, but some sectors of the populations are left behind in relative
poverty, showing that the benefits from growth do not trickle down to the
whole population, especially to the most vulnerable. This pattern of economic
evolution parallels a general movement from informal to formal governance
structures. This makes formal policy interventions less effective for less-
developed basins. Similarly, as incomes increase there are more livelihood
opportunities, which blurs the relationship between water and poverty. In a
nutshell, when economies develop, we see a weakening of the link between
the provision of natural resources and livelihood outcomes.
Socio-economic development changes the manner in which food and water
systems utilize ecosystem services (freshwater, soil formation, nutrient cycling)
within geographically diverse river basins. We order these with respect to
development along a single trajectory (Byerlee et al., 2009). This trajectory is