Local opinion: Tackling water insecurity with community-based solutions

In a state where every drop counts, the rainfall numbers tell a story of mounting environmental desperation. Phoenix recorded just 0.01 inches of rain in January, Tucson managed only 0.10 inches, and Flagstaff saw a meager 0.19 inches. With extreme drought now covering 21% of the state and exceptional drought spreading across multiple counties, our water security is not just at risk — it’s disappearing.

With drought, more people are vulnerable to water insecurity, or the lack of affordable and reliable access to uncontaminated water. And many of Arizona’s residents are already grappling with conditions of water insecurity.

Arizona Water for All (AW4A) is a program of ASU’s Arizona Water Innovation Initiative bringing together community advocates, nonprofit organizations, and state agencies to address water insecurity through community-based approaches. This statewide network — with nodes in Tucson, Tempe, and Flagstaff — aims to promote community participation in research and policy related to water decision-making and to better plan for the future of access to this precious resource, particularly for the state’s most vulnerable residents.

AW4A has been partnering with community-based organizations and groups to host dialogues around water and to engage in action-oriented research, seeking to transform how we understand and address water challenges across the state. The dialogues we have co-convened to date have illuminated everyday experiences of water insecurity in our region and the ways that this experience is often naturalized and normalized. For example, many southern Arizona residents are accustomed to buying bottled water, making multiple trips each week to purchase water in bulk from a water station for their drinking, cooking, and sometimes even bathing needs, or installing water filtration systems at home.

In short, many of us have come to regard ensuring access to clean, uncontaminated water for household use as a personal responsibility. Few of us trust the quality of tap water or believe that change is possible.

However, borderland contexts like our own are often looked to as laboratories for creative and collaborative solutions. Author Michelle Tellez for instance highlights in Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas how residents along the U.S.-Mexico border self-organize to erect their own infrastructure, from establishing their own schools to installing clean water systems. This is something we’ve also observed in the central Mediterranean, where solidarity economies and initiatives that support collective material and social wellbeing emerge following decades of extraction by external actors, organized crime, and institutional neglect.

These lessons from elsewhere are important reminders that together with our neighbors, we can transform private hardships into collective action. AW4A is working to take lessons from our own border region to support water insecure residents both locally and statewide. By prioritizing outreach with organizations and groups across southern Arizona, organizing conversations around household and community-level water insecurity, building awareness about water-related struggles in our communities, and helping to advance local solutions, our vision is to ensure water security for all residents.

To be sure, the greater Tucson region is home to several organizations doing very important work around issues of water conservation, governance, and access. Yet the problem of water insecurity at the scale of an entire state and region requires that we all play a role and have a voice in shaping resource futures.