Water Insecurity in a Rapidly Growing City in Arequipa, Peru: Narratives, Conflicts, and Opportunities for Change

Project Overview

Climate change is increasingly affecting water availability worldwide. In cities, water is becoming scarcer, generating household water insecurity that falls disproportionately on women. In agriculture, climate variability and shifting rainfall patterns are progressively reducing the water available for production. Yet scarcity is not driven by climate alone: state investments (such as large-scale irrigation projects), water governance, urban planning, and migration all shape who accesses water, in what quantity, and under what conditions.

In Peru, these dynamics are starkly evident in the Majes–Colca basin, in Arequipa, where this study was conducted across two settings connected by a single hydrological system: A) Majes–Pedregal, a rapidly growing city, and B) high-Andean communities of the Colca Valley, affected by the implementation of the Majes–Siguas Special Project (PEMS). Although PEMS spurred agricultural development and migration toward Majes, it was not accompanied by adequate investment in infrastructure or by equitable water governance, producing deep inequalities in water access between the two territories.

Using a qualitative approach based on in-depth interviews, focus groups, and ethnographic observation, the study examines the structural determinants of water insecurity, the coping strategies (particularly those led by women), and their impacts on health, livelihoods, and food security. The analysis draws on two complementary frameworks: political ecology and the social determinants of health.

The project aims to generate evidence and recommendations to strengthen water management policies that are more equitable and resilient to climate change at both ends of the basin.

Preliminary Findings

A. Majes: Water for Irrigation, but Not for Those Who Work the Land

Urban migration, gender inequalities in water access, and impacts on health and nutrition

Majes–Pedregal is one of the clearest examples of how an irrigation project can transform the agricultural landscape without resolving (and even deepening) household water insecurity. Originally planned to house around 40,000 people, the city today exceeds 120,000 inhabitants, the product of decades of migration drawn by the availability of farmland under the Majes–Siguas Special Project (PEMS). This growth, however, occurred largely through informal land occupation: roughly 61% of dwellings lack a formal land title, which limits formal access to basic services such as water, sanitation, and electricity.

The result is a profoundly unequal map of water access. While the central, older districts enjoy continuous supply, peripheral settlements receive water roughly every 13 days, and at least 30 settlements depend exclusively on tanker trucks. The study's central paradox is that more than 90% of households on agricultural plots (connected to the PEMS irrigation canals that sustain the city's economy) have no access to safe drinking water.

This inequity is not incidental: it reflects a combination of rapid migration, public infrastructure that failed to keep pace with population growth, and a historical prioritization of water for agricultural irrigation over domestic consumption.

The consequences are felt in the health and daily life of families. Households report recurrent episodes of gastrointestinal illness and skin infections among children, as well as reduced dietary diversity. And, as in many contexts of water insecurity, it is women who bear the greatest burden of managing, storing, and securing water for the home, a burden rarely visible in official statistics, yet one that structures the daily life of thousands of migrant families.

B. The Colca Valley: The Other Side of the Canal

Water inequity, food-system transformations, and community resilience after decades of extraction in the Andes

While Majes flourished thanks to water transferred through the Majes–Siguas Special Project (PEMS) canal, the high-Andean communities of the Colca Valley (located within the same basin but upstream) faced a different story: that of territories that gave up their water for four decades without receiving a proportional benefit.

The study reveals chronic investment inequity. While the state sustains major investments in coastal irrigation (now continuing with the project's expansion, PEMS-II), irrigation infrastructure in the high-Andean zones remains deteriorated and neglected. This gap is further expressed in a structural divide within the valley itself: communities on the left bank (where the PEMS canal passes) secured partial access only after years of collective struggle, whereas those on the right bank (such as Lari, Ichupampa, and Madrigal, where the canal does not pass) received no additional water and depend on springs and high-Andean wetlands that dry up between October and December, before the rains arrive.

Compounding this is persistent institutional fragility: water-use licenses unchanged since 2007 and scant technical support from the state for improving irrigation infrastructure in the valley. Scarcity and market pressures are transforming the food system, pushing farmers toward commercial crops and agrochemicals, weakening traditional livestock raising, and eroding agrobiodiversity. In the case of Madrigal, unremediated mine tailings and active informal mining threaten both farmland and the community's only source of drinking water.

Despite this neglect, communities sustain a remarkable cultural resilience: they maintain communal water distribution, collective canal cleaning (faenas), and water rituals (pago al agua). Yet youth out-migration is weakening the intergenerational transmission of this knowledge, closing a cycle: the same infrastructure that turned the desert into fertile land has left the communities of origin with less water, fewer young people, and an increasingly uncertain water future.

Taken together, both cases show that, within a single basin, water insecurity is the product both of climate pressures (declining rainfall, retreating glaciers, and dwindling natural sources) and of water governance and the decisions and investments that determine where water flows and who is left out. Recognizing this political dimension is essential to designing genuinely equitable responses.