Gregory Pierce

Water service disconnections and household debt reflect the intersection of residential affordability, utility finance, and household well‐being but remain poorly understood due to fragmented and inconsistent data. This paper synthesizes existing evidence on residential water disconnections and on‐bill debt in the United States, with an emphasis on post‐pandemic policy shifts and emerging administrative data sources. We argue that water service disconnections reflect a combination of affordability constraints, utility policies and practices, and customer payment behavior. These factors shape when and why disconnections occur, with implications for household well‐being and utility financial sustainability. Addressing the seemingly ubiquitous goal of affordable water service therefore requires grappling not only with the level of bills relative to household income, but also more direct engagement with the institutional practice of disconnections and debt recovery. We thus identify key gaps in understanding the causal effects of enforcement strategies, assistance programs, communication interventions, and debt recovery mechanisms, and propose a set of testable hypotheses for advancing knowledge.

NA - editorial team requested we remove the abstract upon resubmission.

In the wake of the January 2025 Los Angeles Fires, a dramatic shift in perception related to water systems and their ability to fight wildfires may have occurred. This study is the first to empirically examine the extent of regional public opinion regarding the role of water management in the LA fires, leveraging a unique, representative survey of 1,360 Los Angeles County households conducted in February and March 2025. This data source allows us to analyze the degree to which residents in the region who were affected by the fires to different degrees attribute blame for the wildfires to poor water management. It also enables us to study which specific household-level factors─including direct or indirect experience of the fires; political sentiment from partisan cues; and longer-standing socioeconomic, demographic, and behavioral elements─influence this attribution. We find descriptively that water management was the fifth most common factor perceived to be responsible for the fires’ impact. While several household-level characteristics correspond with this blame attribution, when we further examine potential explanations using multivariate regression techniques, we find that political sentiment from partisan cues was by far the most powerful explanatory factor.

California's efforts to advance the Human Right to Water are constrained by limited household‐level data on water insecurity. Using the 2021 CalSpeaks statewide probability survey ( n = 628) this study offers the first representative look at water insecurity across California households. Results reveal significant water‐related struggles: approximately 23% of respondents worried about having enough water to meet their household needs, 15% worried about perceived health impacts from water quality, and 7% struggled with affordability. Negative binomial regression models show that water insecurity is not randomly distributed: households with non‐white residents, households which rely on private or small water companies for water service or receive public assistance experience disproportionately higher water insecurity. Sensitivity analyses indicate that some predictors—such as household size and employment—are more strongly associated with frequent water insecurity experiences, underscoring the need for multidimensional monitoring. These findings highlight that system‐level compliance metrics substantially underestimate household‐level challenges and reinforce the need for policies that address affordability, quality, accessibility, worry, and trust to achieve California's Human Right to Water.

Water is intrinsically entwined with multiple elements such as energy, food, resource (otherwise waste), greenhouse gas emissions, ecosystem, and land system, which make these complex interdependencies challengeable to manage at different regions and scales. This roadmap charts actionable pathways toward water-positive, waste-zero, and net-zero–aligned water resource management by treating water services as a coupled water–energy–waste–carbon system rather than a stand-alone infrastructure sector. It synthesizes current status, binding constraints, and deployment-ready interventions across treatment, reuse, resource recovery, agriculture, watershed management, and digital decision-support, with attention to technology readiness, institutional capacity, and regional feasibility. The roadmap emphasizes that many failures in water sustainability are not primarily technical but arise from governance, incentives, legitimacy, and data quality, and therefore integrates social-science insights on public acceptance, equity, and workforce development alongside engineering solutions. To move beyond aspirational recommendations, it proposes an auditable measurement framework, minimum indicators for water efficiency and security, energy intensity, greenhouse-gas emissions, materials circularity, and service equity, and outlines a phased implementation pathway (near-, mid-, and long-term) with stakeholder responsibilities and monitoring, reporting, and verification requirements. It also highlights cross-sector risks and trade-offs, including climate-driven volatility, emerging contaminants, cybersecurity, and the potential for burden shifting between water and energy decarbonization. By providing a systems-oriented structure for prioritization, scenario evaluation, and accountable deployment, this roadmap is intended to support policymakers, utilities, basin authorities, financiers, and researchers in designing credible, context-specific strategies that deliver resilient water services while advancing circular economy and climate goals.