Abstract

Desalination has gained relevance as a freshwater production technology due to the alarming on-going and anticipated climate extremes that are expected to affect the global hydrologic cycle, combined with an unprecedented urbanisation rate that puts stress on water resources and causes scarcity even in areas once abundant in water resources. The economic implications and environmental impacts of desalination, such as the effects of brine discharge on marine ecosystems and CO2 emissions, have been studied in depth and are well documented. Nonetheless, there is a series of indirect socio-environmental impacts that international literature has paid little attention to and has done so principally through theoretical models and approaches. The present work proposes a conceptual and methodological approach that permits to identify and analyse these indirect impacts, based on two assumptions. First, the perception of seawater as an endless resource stimulates the creation of new urban water uses and diminishes conservation efforts, resulting in the transformation of physical water scarcity into socially constructed scarcity. Second, different social groups do not have the same capacity to react before service drawbacks, including price increases, quality concerns and incidents of service discontinuity, a fact that generates uneven social impacts. Urban water metabolism is employed as a conceptual and methodological tool, as a means to identify, quantify and interpret the consequences of the introduction of desalinated water in a city’s metabolic processes. The use of annual metabolic indicators on water consumption and distribution network efficiency is expected to confirm the generation of the impacts supposed here.