When the Tap Fails: How Measuring Water Insecurity Exposes Hidden Hunger in Australia and the Asia Pacific

Food security policy has long treated water as an upstream problem, something that matters for irrigating crops and filling reservoirs but rarely as a force that shapes what families actually eat each day. A new opinion article published in PLOS Water argues that this blind spot is no longer defensible. Jacqui Webster of the University of Technology Sydney and colleagues from the Dharriwaa Elders Group, the Walgett Aboriginal Medical Service, Permatil in Timor-Leste and the University of New South Wales draw on field evidence from Australia and the Asia Pacific to make a technically grounded case: unless policymakers measure how people experience water insecurity in their daily lives, food security strategies will keep missing the households most at risk. The argument arrives at a moment when climate change is intensifying water variability across the region, and when Australia is consulting on a National Food Security Strategy that, the authors contend, fails to explicitly name water insecurity as a priority.

The core of the argument is methodological. Conventional assessments of water security rely on hydrological modelling, infrastructure inventories and supply-side statistics: how many pipes exist, how much water is available, how many connections are installed. These measures say nothing about whether the water that reaches a household is safe, reliable, acceptable or affordable, or about the trade-offs families make when it is not. Experiential scales change that. The Household Water Insecurity Experiences Scale, known as HWISE, was developed and validated for low- and middle-income settings and asks households directly about problems such as worrying about having enough water, going without washing, or drinking water they believed was unsafe. Similarly, the Food Insecurity Experiences Scale and the Household Food Insecurity Access Scale capture lived experiences of hunger and dietary compromise. When deployed together, these instruments reveal coupled deprivation that neither measure can expose alone.

The clearest illustration comes from Walgett, a remote town of roughly 2,000 people in northern New South Wales, where the Barwon and Namoi rivers meet. Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations there had raised concerns about drinking water quality for years. In 2018, national media reported that sodium concentrations in the town supply had reached approximately 300 milligrams per litre, nearly double the Australian palatability guideline and far above levels recommended for people managing chronic conditions such as hypertension and kidney disease, which occur at high prevalence in Aboriginal populations. From a purely infrastructural standpoint, Walgett had a functioning water system. From the perspective of the people drinking the water, it was a system that many could not safely or acceptably use.

In 2022, supported by a National Health and Medical Research Council Ideas Grant, the community ran a survey using the internationally validated HWISE and food insecurity instruments. The results were stark. Forty-six per cent of participants experienced food insecurity and 44 per cent experienced water insecurity, while almost one third experienced both at the same time. Participants who were water insecure were far more likely to be food insecure, a statistical association that turns the abstract policy language of integration into a measurable household reality. Four out of five respondents relied on bottled water, typically spending between 30 and 50 Australian dollars a week on it. In a low-income community, that recurring expenditure directly competes with the household food budget, effectively converting a water quality failure into a nutrition problem.

The surveys also changed the politics. Wendy Spencer, General Manager of the Dharriwaa Elders Group, described the shift in terms that capture why experiential data matters beyond its technical content. Prior to the surveys, she said, the community knew there was a problem but no one would listen; the data gave them a voice and helped inform their solutions. That observation goes to the heart of the authors’ case. Infrastructure descriptors and aggregate supply statistics cannot register the daily decisions of a parent choosing between bottled water and fresh vegetables, but a validated experiential scale can, and in doing so it creates evidence that institutions are obliged to engage with.

Walgett is not an outlier. Modelling by the Australian National University, published in npj Clean Water, estimated that more than 600,000 people across more than 400 locations are likely consuming water that does not meet health guidelines for quality, and that 44 per cent of those locations are Aboriginal communities. Read together with the Walgett survey findings, this points to a systemic national problem rather than a collection of local anomalies. Yet the authors note that Australia’s current consultation on a National Food Security Strategy does not explicitly position water insecurity as a priority area. Without experiential indicators embedded in national monitoring, they argue, the strategy risks addressing food supply and affordability while overlooking the fundamental constraint that unsafe or unacceptable water places on what households can prepare, drink and afford.

The mechanism linking water to food is worth spelling out, because it operates through several distinct pathways. Poor water quality forces substitution: households avoid the tap and buy bottled water or switch to sugar-sweetened beverages, a pattern documented in international research on tap water avoidance and diet-related disease. Unreliable supply disrupts food preparation and hygiene, raising the risk of gastrointestinal illness that itself worsens nutritional status. And the financial burden of alternative water sources crowds out spending on healthy food. Each pathway is invisible in infrastructure statistics, and each becomes quantifiable when water insecurity is measured experientially alongside food insecurity. This is why the authors describe integration as a methodological necessity rather than an advocacy aspiration.

The same logic is now spreading through the Asia Pacific. In Timor-Leste, an Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research-funded project led by Permatil, a community-based organisation promoting permaculture and sustainable livelihoods, has begun training local practitioners and piloting the Food Insecurity Experiences Scale and the Water Insecurity Experiences Scales. Outcome data are not yet available, but the initiative demonstrates a capacity-building model in which local organisations lead survey implementation, ethical data collection and community-centred evidence generation, embedding experiential measurement within broader water management and food system work. For a young nation where households face interacting pressures from climate variability, the approach offers a way to detect vulnerability that conventional indicators alone cannot capture.

For the water research and engineering community, the implications are practical rather than rhetorical. The authors point to case studies from Nepal and Sierra Leone showing that experiential water insecurity measures are useful for monitoring and evaluating WASH programs, revealing behavioural and economic barriers that determine whether technically sound interventions actually improve lives. Paired with biophysical indicators, experiential data provide a fuller picture of system performance: they can sharpen targeting, strengthen accountability, and test whether policies are moving the outcomes that matter to households. The metrics the authors propose are concrete and demanding: fewer families forced to spend scarce income on bottled water, fewer households facing trade-offs between water and food, and more equitable access to safe, reliable drinking water.

What makes the argument compelling is that it reframes who defines the problem. A water system can look adequate on paper while failing the people it serves, and a food strategy can project national abundance while households in remote communities ration both what they drink and what they eat. Measuring experiences closes that gap between system-level adequacy and household-level reality, and the Walgett case shows the data can shift power as well as policy, giving Aboriginal community organisations the evidence to demand and design their own solutions. As climate change accelerates and water variability deepens across Australia and the Asia Pacific, the authors’ conclusion is blunt: integrating experiential measures of water insecurity into food security measurement and policy is no longer optional. It is the difference between a strategy that counts pipes and one that counts people.

Subject of Research: Experiential measurement of household water and food insecurity to inform integrated food and water security policy in Australia and the Asia Pacific

Article Title: Measuring people’s experiences to inform integrated solutions to food and water security in Australia and the Asia Pacific region

Article References: Webster, J., Spencer, W., Corby, C., Lemos, E., & Leslie, G. (2026). Measuring people’s experiences to inform integrated solutions to food and water security in Australia and the Asia Pacific region. PLOS Water, 5(10), e0000647. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pwat.0000647

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pwat.0000647

Keywords: water insecurity, food security, HWISE scale, Walgett, Timor-Leste, Aboriginal health, drinking water quality, experiential measures, PLOS Water, climate variability, national food strategy, Asia Pacific