1. An Exploration of Water Poverty in Lao People’s Democratic Republic Marko Kallio ProGIS Seminaari 8 November 2016

2. Water Poverty
Water is closely linked with majority of UN’s Sustainable Development Goals
Jobs, economic growth, global risks…
Water poverty: "a lack of access to sufficient and adequate quality water resource for basic needs“
English definition: Not being able to pay one's water bills

3. Laos
Poor
Rural
One of the least developed nations

4. Research questions
Are there distinct differences between areas in their water poverty?
2. Are there distinct spatio-temporal differences in water poverty?
3. What are the causes of water poverty in Laos? Do the causes differ across space and seasons?

5. Methods Water Poverty Index WPI Components
Multidimensional composite index
Calculated for 8215 villages across the country
WPI calculated for dry and wet season separately
Analytical weighting of components using PCA
WPI Components
Resources: water availability (modelled)
Access: presence of water infrastructure
Capacity: local management capacity
Use: water use and dependency of village population
Environment: land use, disaster occurrence, soil degradation…

6. Methods Exploratory (spatial) data analysis Spatial data mining
Geographically weighted summary statistics
Geographically weighted regression
Geographically weighted principal component analysis
Spatial clustering
Geographical weighting has many options…
Simple Gaussian weighting with 400 nearest neighbors

7. Spatial differences in WPI
Water-poor areas
Water-rich areas

8. Seasonal difference

9. Seasonal difference in provinces

10. Clusters

11. GWPCA

12. GW Regression

13. Causes of water poverty
Main relative cause is found in Capacity component
In the North, Resource availability causes problems
Road access!
Significant spatial differences
Capacity and Use indicators among the 11 most important regression coefficient
Use: low score, strong correlation

14. Conclusion Most important outcomes: New research topics:
Single index score not enough (in highly variable climates)
Causes of water poverty differ according to season
New research topics:
Better inclusion of seasonality in to WPI
Seasonal water poverty; can one really be worse off water-wise in the wet season…?

15. Thank you. Data and R code available in http://markokallio
Thank you! Data and R code available in and

16. Water availability modelling
Distributed physically based conceptual hydrological model
5kmx5km grid cell
Rainfall and temp. interpolated from point observations
No dams/reservoirs!!!
Mekong mainstream ~