Huge Swaths Of The Country Are At Risk Of Losing Affordable Water Access

Access to clean water remains a huge problem around the US — while Flint has been in the headlines, thousands of other locales are struggling with similar problems. But access to clean water isn't the only issue facing Americans — access to affordable water, period, is becoming riskier and riskier around the country. This map shows census tracts where access to affordable water is defined as either "at-risk" or "high-risk" — it's not pretty:  

Here's how the study's authors define "at-risk" and "high-risk":

The high-risk group is defined as people located in census tracts with median incomes below $32,000. These are census tracts with likely concentrations of people who face affordability challenges based on current water rates. The at-risk group is defined as tracts with median incomes between $32,000 and $45,120. These at-risk tracts have concentrations of people with median incomes below the minimum income thresholds needed to afford future increases in water rates.

And they're not optimistic about the future of water access around the country: 

[W]hile water rates are currently unaffordable for an estimated 11.9% of households, the conservative estimates of rising rates used in this study highlight that this number could grow to 35.6% in the next five years. More dramatic rate increases could place an even larger segment of the population at-risk. The privatization of water services could also mean much higher water rates for customers.

Read the full paper at PLOS ONE

If there's a way to get this trend moving in the other direction, policy-makers will need to figure something out soon. 

[Via Boing Boing]