Below is the second installment of Alanna Shaikh’s two-part series on the cost of water:

By: Alanna Shaikh

If we want people to take water conservation seriously, we’re going to have to make them pay for water. How can we do that in a way that’s fair to poor and vulnerable populations?

So, you’ve got a country with a water system that can be metered. You also believe that water is a human right. What do you do?

You find a middle ground. Our options don’t actually have to consist of Central-Asia style water waste or some kind of grim future where poor people die of thirst, like Dickens where H20 replaces the porridge.

The option I like best goes like this: you get a certain amount of water for free — a reasonable amount per household, based on household size. Everything you use beyond that amount, you pay for; you would set that additional fee high so that the extra fees cover the cost of maintaining the water system. Yes, it makes things like swimming pools or long showers as luxuries, but that seems right to me. A swimming pool is not a human right. Drinking water and good health are.

Kofi Annan framed water and sanitation as a human right during his tenure as UN secretary general, “Access to safe water is a fundamental human need and therefore a basic human right.” And I agree, but access to unlimited water just hurts your community, your environment, and eventually yourself. Enough water and unlimited water are two very different creatures.

If you charged for water here in Tajikistan, people would stop leaving their watermelons under a running tap for hours to simulate a mountain stream. They’d build houses with pipes that had enough insulation to keep them from freezing in the winter, instead of just letting them run to keep the ice away. They’d stop creating rice paddies and start growing crops that make sense in a desert.

What would enough water consist of? In the US, average household water use is 154 gallons per day; in China, on the other hand, it is 16[i]. I’d suggest that enough water falls somewhere in between. Enough to wash every day, but not enough for 45-minute showers. Enough for bathtubs but not enough for swimming pools. That would be the demand base for identifying enough and it would work in places where water is abundant. You’d have to charge a lot once people exceed their free share in order to fund the system, but the swimming pool crowd would probably get you through.

You could also identify enough based on supply. How much water does the municipal water system have? How does that break down per person? You cannot give people more water than you possess; their fair share could be considered inherently enough. The flaw here is that water supply isn’t just about what nature has given us; it is also about water systems and how effectively they use and treat water. A bad municipal system could slowly get worse, or a good one overwhelmed by population growth, and the share of free water would get worse over time until the situation was a human right violation.

Even with those risks, though, any cost-recovery system is better than nothing. Bringing money in to pay for water and reducing the demand for water at the same time is a win-win situation.

i. Let me state for the record – 154 gallons a day is madness.

Alanna Shaikh is an expert in health consulting, writing about global health for UN Dispatch and about international relief and development at Blood & Milk. She also serves as a frequently contributing blogger to ‘End the Neglect.’ The views and opinions expressed by guest bloggers are not necessarily the views and opinions of the Global Network. All opinions expressed here are Alanna’s own and not those of any employer or the US government.