Stay Hydrated. The Value of Water

The topic of water is important for the geostrategic position of every single country in the world. However, the operational issues of water are very often distributed to the lower levels of region, city, and community. The state water policies are very often coherent documents with clear strategies, but when they reach the local level, where they should be implemented, we encounter quite a complicated situation resulting in bad maintenance or privatization of key segments of water distribution without the private companies significantly giving back to the community.

Through the issue of the profit from water, we come to the matter of its actual value – which is hard to express only through economic units like money or gold. We have compared prices of water in selected big cities with their average prices of labour (average salaries), and from these numbers, we have counted different values of water represented by the amount of work time needed to afford 1 cubic meter of tap water. Fully aware, that in some regions the statistical data do not correspond with reality, we still regard these indicative figures as impressive.

The last subject we touch on is the emancipation of water, or to use the western world terminology: the democratization of water. We focus on showcasing the processes that can be developed by responsible authorities, as well as individuals. The aim is to understand water as an important common value that should not be private and regarded as a perpetually renewable unlimited source.