Water Systems Are Failing in Plain Sight: Why Utility Literacy Could Save Them

Every time a toilet flushes or a tap runs, an immense and largely hidden network of pipes, pumps, treatment plants and financing arrangements springs into action. Yet the people who depend on that network the most rarely understand how it works, how it is paid for, or how their own daily choices ripple through it. A new comment article published in Nature Water on 25 September 2026 argues that this gap in public understanding, which the author Ahmed Rachid El-Khattabi of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill terms a deficit in utility literacy, is quietly undermining the reliability of the water, wastewater and stormwater services on which modern life depends. The central claim is deceptively simple: infrastructure cannot be sustained by engineering alone. It requires an informed public that grasps the technical, financial and governance dimensions of the systems serving it, and that participates in the decisions determining whether those systems endure or decay.

The concept of utility literacy, as outlined in the article, goes well beyond knowing where water comes from. El-Khattabi defines it as practical knowledge that enables households, community leaders and decision-makers to support water services effectively and sustainably. That includes understanding how household behaviours affect downstream infrastructure, how utility rates and municipal budgets translate into pipe replacement and treatment capacity, and how governance choices at the local, regional and national levels shape long-term service reliability. The framing draws on a rich scholarly lineage. The article’s references invoke classic work on collaborative planning by Judith Innes and David Booher, theorists of the co-production of public services such as the pioneering 1981 research by Robert Parks and colleagues, and the widely cited framework of entitlements and responsibilities developed by legal scholar Carol Rose, who examined why public goods such as water are often best managed collectively rather than through pure market logic.

Why does this matter now? The article points to converging stressors bearing down on water systems worldwide: aging infrastructure approaching or exceeding its design life, climate variability that overwhelms stormwater systems and dries up sources, shifting population patterns that leave utilities with fewer ratepayers to cover fixed costs, and tightening regulatory expectations for emerging contaminants. Each of these pressures is significant on its own. Together, they form a compound threat to service reliability that cannot be resolved by utilities acting alone. Public behaviour matters because customers are not passive recipients of a service. What gets flushed, poured down drains or discarded influences whether sewer networks clog with fatbergs and whether treatment plants can operate efficiently. Whether residents vote for rate increases, bond measures and utility board members determines whether the financial foundations of the system erode or strengthen.

The evidence for a widespread literacy gap is sobering. The article cites the JD Power 2022 US Water Utility Residential Customer Satisfaction Study, which documents how little residential customers typically know about the utilities serving them and how dissatisfied many are with communication about water quality, rates and infrastructure needs. Customer satisfaction surveys of this kind repeatedly reveal that households often view water as an almost magical commodity that should be inexpensive, universally available and invisible. When rates rise to fund necessary repairs, the reaction is frequently outrage rather than understanding. When service disruptions occur, trust erodes quickly because residents lack the background knowledge to interpret what went wrong and what fixing it will require. This dynamic creates a political environment in which it is easier for elected officials to defer maintenance and suppress rates than to make the case for sustained investment.

El-Khattabi illustrates the behavioural side of the problem with striking and, at first glance, almost comic examples drawn from recent events. The article cites research on fatbergs, the enormous congealed masses of fats, oils, grease and non-flushable items that accumulate in sewer systems, including a 2024 master’s thesis examining how these blockages are represented in public discourse. It also references reporting on the surge in plumbing emergencies that follows Thanksgiving celebrations in the United States, a phenomenon so reliable that the day after the holiday has been dubbed Brown Friday by plumbing services. Behind the humour lies a serious technical reality: sewer networks and treatment facilities are engineered with specific hydraulic and biochemical tolerances. When households dispose of cooking grease, wipes and other inappropriate materials through the drainage system, they impose costs that propagate through the entire network, from increased pump maintenance to emergency overflows that release untreated wastewater into the environment.

The governance dimension of utility literacy is equally consequential, and arguably even less visible to the average resident. The article draws on work by Greg Pierce and colleagues published in Nature Water in 2025, along with research in Utilities Policy by William Nicholas and Sridhar Vedachalam, to situate the literacy problem within broader debates about how water services are organized and financed. In many jurisdictions, decisions about rates, capital projects and service boundaries are made by boards and councils whose deliberations attract minimal public attention. Land-use planning decisions, examined in the planning literature cited by the article, determine where new development occurs and therefore where infrastructure obligations grow, often without coordination between planners and utility managers. Research on housing development in wildfire-prone areas, such as the widely cited 2012 PLoS ONE study by Alexandra Syphard and colleagues, exemplifies a broader pattern: settlement decisions are frequently made with inadequate accounting for infrastructure and hazard constraints, generating liabilities that water and wastewater systems must later absorb.

The conceptual framework presented in the article, illustrated in its first figure, organizes utility literacy as a bridge connecting households, community leaders and decision-makers to the performance of water, wastewater and stormwater systems. The framework implies that literacy operates on several distinct levels. At the household level, it means understanding the consequences of consumption and disposal choices. At the community level, it means possessing the collective capacity to deliberate about trade-offs, such as balancing affordability against the need for capital investment. At the decision-maker level, it means appreciating the technical constraints and long-term financial dynamics that should inform policy. The article’s argument echoes the co-production literature it cites: public services are not delivered to citizens but produced with them, and the quality of the outcome depends on the knowledge and engagement of everyone involved.

What makes the argument timely is its diagnosis of a feedback loop between invisibility and decline. Water infrastructure is deliberately hidden underground, and utilities have historically been rewarded for staying out of sight and out of mind. That invisibility served systems well when they were new and generously funded, but it becomes a liability in an era of renewal. Residents who do not understand the system cannot advocate for it, and politicians who do not face informed constituents have little electoral incentive to fund it. The result is chronic underinvestment, deferred maintenance, service failures and declining trust, which further weakens public willingness to pay. Breaking this loop requires making the invisible visible, the phrase that anchors the article’s title, through deliberate efforts to strengthen public understanding of how water services function and what they require.

The article, published as a comment piece rather than an empirical study, functions as a call to action for the water sector. Its implications extend to utility communication strategies, to the design of rate structures that customers can comprehend, to school and community education about water systems, and to planning processes that deliberately involve residents in infrastructure decisions. El-Khattabi, who is affiliated with both the Environmental Finance Center at the University of North Carolina’s School of Government and the university’s Department of City and Regional Planning, brings a perspective grounded in the financial and governance realities of utilities, fields in which public comprehension is often the binding constraint on reform. The article declares no competing interests and situates itself within a growing body of work arguing that sustainable urban water management is as much a social and educational challenge as an engineering one.

The deeper lesson of the piece is that the future of water services will be decided not only in treatment plants and pipe networks but in kitchens, classrooms and council chambers. Systems face converging stressors that threaten reliability, and no utility can overcome those stressors without a public that understands what is at stake. Utility literacy, in El-Khattabi’s formulation, is the practical knowledge that transforms residents from passive customers into informed partners in sustaining the service. Making the invisible visible is therefore not a metaphor but a policy programme: one that asks the water sector to explain itself, asks communities to engage, and asks decision-makers to treat public understanding as critical infrastructure in its own right. Whether that programme takes hold may determine whether the pipes beneath our cities keep flowing for the next century, or fall silent long before their time.

Subject of Research: Public utility literacy and the sustainability of water, wastewater and stormwater services

Article Title: Make the invisible visible by strengthening utility literacy to sustain water services

Article References: El-Khattabi, A. R. (2026). Make the invisible visible by strengthening utility literacy to sustain water services. Nature Water. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-026-00712-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s44221-026-00712-y

Keywords: utility literacy, water services, wastewater, stormwater, infrastructure, water governance, water rates, fatbergs, customer behaviour, public engagement, sustainable water management, Nature Water