Cost of Sustainable Water Management

This dataset should not be interpreted as a prediction of the cost to deliver sustainable water management, but as a resource to support better informed decisions by decision-makers. There are many pathways to resolving existing water challenges, and this dataset has developed only one pathway. The pathway proposed relies on global models that do not fully reflect local data, policy, or other contextual factors. The proposed method may be replicated on a local level with more precise data, but this dataset should not be used to inform local decisions on water resource management.

This dataset calculates the cost of action, but does not discuss the financing mechanisms used to deliver funding to achieve these costs, whether from public sector, private sector, tariffs, or other financing mechanisms.

Data used to determine sanitation and water access costs assumes that current water related infrastructure is fully functional and working at maximum capacity. Additionally, access rates are assessed differently in each country. Lastly, the data used for these values were only for 140 countries and the rest of the world rates were estimated using rates from similar countries.

The costs calculated to reduce water scarcity were estimated based on each country's purchasing power parity and cost of the most efficient water saving solutions. It does not consider that some water saving solutions are not viable in every country.