Water

Cambridge IGCSE Geography 0460 · Paper 1 Geographical Themes · Theme 3 Economic development Syllabus: 2025 and 2026 Official syllabus point: 3.6, with one required Case Study

This topic is examined up to and including the November 2026 series. It does not appear in the 2027 syllabus. Cambridge removed the settlement, water and weather topics when it revised 0460 for first examination in 2027, and the revised syllabus says so in its own list of changes. If you are sitting 0460 in 2027 or later, close this page: nothing on it can be asked of you. If you are sitting June 2026 or November 2026, or the March 2026 series in India, this is live content and question 6 on Paper 1 has been built from it repeatedly.

Water is a single subtopic, not a whole theme topic, so it is smaller than the others in Theme 3. That does not make it a soft option. It carries a required case study, it produces a 7 mark levelled question in its own right, and it is a favourite source of the 5 mark decision making question where you must justify one strategy and attack another.

1. What the syllabus actually asks

The 2025 and 2026 syllabus lists exactly two things you must be able to do, one further guidance box and one case study.

Candidates should be able to:

• Describe methods of water supply and the proportions of water used for agriculture, domestic and industrial purposes in countries at different levels of economic development
• Explain why there are water shortages in some areas and demonstrate that careful management is required to ensure future supplies

Further guidance:

• Methods of water supply (including reservoirs/dams, wells and bore holes, desalination)
• The impact of lack of access to clean water on local people and the potential for economic development

Case Study required for 3.6:

• Water supply in a country or area

Read that list closely, because it tells you what the examiner can and cannot ask.

• The word including appears in the further guidance, which by the syllabus's own rule means the list of methods is not exhaustive. Reservoirs and dams, wells and boreholes and desalination are the three you must know. Rainwater harvesting, pipelines, water transfer schemes, aquifers, tankers and bottled water are all credited in real mark schemes, so learn them too.
• Proportions is in the first statement, so figures are examinable, and so is the contrast between countries at different levels of development.
• The second statement contains the word demonstrate, which is what turns this from a list topic into an evaluation topic. You have to show that management is needed, not just assert it.
• The impact statement has two halves: on local people, and on the potential for economic development. Answers that only cover disease and time lost miss half the mark scheme.

Where this topic stops and the rivers topic begins

Water appears twice in 0460 and students constantly write the wrong one.

The overlap is real but narrow. A dam appears in both topics, and it is doing a different job in each: in the rivers topic it is a flood control structure evaluated against downstream sediment loss, and here it is a supply structure evaluated against cost, evaporation and displacement. If the question stem says flood, discharge, channel or landform, you are in the rivers topic. If it says supply, shortage, scarcity, access or demand, you are here.

2. How much water there is, and how little of it is usable

A useful opening figure for any 7 mark answer, because it explains why a planet covered in water has shortages at all.

• About 97% of the water on Earth is salt water in the oceans, and cannot be drunk or used for irrigation without treatment.
• Of the remaining 3% fresh water, roughly two thirds is locked in ice caps and glaciers.
• What is left, less than 1% of all water, is the groundwater, rivers and lakes that everybody actually uses, and it is very unevenly distributed.

1. 97% of water is salt
2. most of the fresh remainder is frozen
3. under 1% is accessible fresh water
4. and that share is concentrated in the wet tropics and mid latitudes
5. so dry, populous regions must move it, store it or manufacture it.

Two terms the examiner rewards:

• Physical water scarcity means there is genuinely not enough water in the environment to meet demand. North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, central Australia and northwest India are the classic regions.
• Economic water scarcity means the water exists but the money, technology, pipes and institutions to deliver it clean do not. Much of sub Saharan Africa is economically, not physically, water scarce: the Congo basin has enormous flow and very poor delivery.

This distinction wins marks on any "explain why some areas have shortages" question, because it lets you split your answer into physical and human causes without repeating yourself.

3. The proportions of water used, and how they change with development

This is an explicit syllabus requirement and it is the part students most often skip.

Global average, all countries together (FAO AQUASTAT):

The pattern then swings sharply with level of economic development.

Exam trap: a country using a small share of its water for domestic purposes is not necessarily using little water per person. India's domestic share is small because agriculture is so enormous, not because Indian homes are frugal. Share and volume per person are different measurements, and a "compare the proportions" question is asking about share.

1. a country industrialises
2. thermal power stations and factories are built
3. industrial withdrawals rise sharply
4. incomes rise
5. homes get piped supply, toilets and appliances
6. domestic use per person rises
7. agriculture's share falls even where the volume irrigated stays the same.

4. The water service ladder, and what "clean" and "improved" mean

Cambridge has set a whole question on the classification the WHO and UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) uses, so learn the five rungs. It is also the vocabulary that makes an answer sound precise rather than vague.

An improved source is one that is protected from outside contamination by the way it is built: piped water, boreholes and tubewells, protected dug wells, protected springs, rainwater collection, and packaged or delivered water.

The ladder gives you two clean paragraphs on any "disadvantages" question, and the mark schemes prove it. The published answers to the lower rungs split neatly:

• Unimproved and surface water are marked on contamination: the water is not treated or purified, it can carry disease, and the burden falls hardest on children and the elderly.
• Basic and limited are marked on time and effort: long journeys each day, time that could have gone to work or education, physically hard carrying, and the fact that the work is often done by children.

That is worth noticing. Cambridge does not treat a queue at a standpipe as a hygiene problem. It treats it as an opportunity cost problem, and marks it that way.

Figures worth quoting, from the JMP report on 2022 data:

• About 2.2 billion people lacked a safely managed drinking water service.
• 703 million did not have even a basic service.
• Around 115 million people still drank untreated surface water.

State the year with the figure. Water statistics move every reporting round, and an undated number reads as guesswork.

5. Methods of water supply

The three named in the syllabus come first, because a question can name them directly. Everything after them is credited in real mark schemes and widens your answer on a 5 mark or 7 mark question.

5a. Reservoirs and dams

A dam is a barrier built across a river valley. The reservoir is the artificial lake that fills behind it. This is the highest volume method available and it is the backbone of supply for most large cities.

1. a river is dammed in a narrow, steep sided valley
2. water backs up behind the wall
3. wet season flow is stored instead of running to the sea
4. water is released or piped through the dry season
5. a city has supply all year instead of only when it rains.

Named examples with figures:

• The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) on the Blue Nile, under construction from 2011, with a reservoir of about 74 billion cubic metres and an installed generating capacity of roughly 5,150 MW. Cambridge has already used the Nile basin and this dam in a question, and it is the textbook case of an upstream country storing water that two downstream countries, Sudan and Egypt, depend on.
• The Aswan High Dam, Egypt, completed in 1970, creating Lake Nasser, one of the largest reservoirs in the world. It gave Egypt year round irrigation and ended the annual Nile flood, at the cost of the silt that had fertilised the floodplain for millennia and the displacement of tens of thousands of Nubian people.

5b. Wells and boreholes

A well is a hole dug or drilled down to the water table so that groundwater can be lifted out. A borehole is the narrow, machine drilled version, usually cased and fitted with a hand pump or an electric pump, and drawing from deeper down.

The water body itself is an aquifer: a layer of permeable rock, such as sandstone, chalk or limestone, that holds water in its pores and cracks.

Cambridge has marked exactly this comparison. A November 2024 question showed three sketches of rural Nigeria, a rainwater harvesting container, a village water pump and a lined well, and asked candidates to justify the well. The credited advantages were that the concrete surround keeps soil out of the water, that the supply is close to homes so people are not queuing, that large amounts are available, and that it does not run dry when the rain fails, so it is sustainable. The credited attacks were that rainwater harvesting only works while it is raining and the stored water goes stagnant and breeds mosquitoes, and that a shared village pump means queuing and lost time.

Learn those four advantages and four attacks. They are transferable to almost any decision making question in this topic.

5c. Desalination

Desalination is the removal of salt from sea water or brackish water to make it drinkable. Two processes are used: distillation, boiling the water and condensing the pure vapour, and reverse osmosis, forcing water at high pressure through a membrane fine enough to hold back the salt. Reverse osmosis dominates new plants because it uses far less energy.

Named examples with figures:

• Israel produces the majority of its municipal drinking water by desalination. The Sorek plant, opened in 2013 on the Mediterranean coast, produces roughly 624,000 cubic metres a day, and reverse osmosis at that scale brought Israel's cost per cubic metre down to among the lowest in the world. Israel also reuses close to 85% to 90% of its treated wastewater in agriculture, the highest reuse rate anywhere.
• Saudi Arabia is the world's largest producer of desalinated water. The Ras Al Khair plant, commissioned in 2014 on the Gulf coast, produces around 1 million cubic metres a day and supplies the capital, Riyadh, several hundred kilometres inland by pipeline.

A mark scheme caution. A June 2024 question established that cost is the problem when desalinated water is used for agriculture. That is the sharp point about desalination: it is affordable for drinking and for industry, where the value of each litre is high, and it is far too expensive for irrigating a field. Say that and you have said something the examiner is looking for.

5d. The other methods mark schemes credit

Cambridge's published lists for "methods used to improve water supply" run wider than the three named ones. All of the following appear:

6. Why there are water shortages in some areas

Split your answer into physical and human causes. Both are needed, and the mark schemes reward both.

Physical causes

• Low total rainfall: arid and semi arid climates, and the areas around 30 degrees north and south where descending air of the Hadley cell suppresses rain.
• Seasonal rainfall: a monsoon or Mediterranean climate delivers a year's rain in a few months, so without storage the rest of the year is a drought.
• Drought, meaning a run of years with rainfall well below the long term average.
• High evaporation rates under high temperatures, which take water out of reservoirs, soils and irrigation channels.
• Permeable geology, so surface water disappears underground and there are no reliable rivers.
• No perennial rivers, a falling water table, or an aquifer already drawn down.
• Distance from the source: many people live nowhere near the wet basins.

Human causes

• Population growth and urbanisation, so demand rises faster than supply is built.
• Rising living standards, adding showers, appliances, gardens and swimming pools.
• Irrigated agriculture, which is by far the largest single withdrawal and the most wasteful, especially with unlined channels and flood irrigation.
• Industrial demand, particularly power station cooling.
• Poverty and lack of investment: no money for pipes, boreholes, reservoirs or treatment. This is the essence of economic scarcity.
• Lack of technology and of trained people to build and maintain what is installed.
• Leaking distribution networks, losing a large share of what has already been treated.
• Pollution of rivers and aquifers, which removes usable water without removing a single litre.
• Political conflict and cross border disputes, which stop a shared river being shared.

Cambridge's own list, for "explain why many rural areas in LEDCs have a shortage of water", was: low rainfall or arid conditions; seasonal rainfall or long drought; no rivers, dried up rivers, or a lowered water table and aquifer; no pipelines or supply infrastructure and no money for them; and little investment or technology for reservoirs, wells and treatment. Notice how far that list leans on poverty, not on climate alone.

1. population grows and cities expand
2. demand for domestic and industrial water rises
3. more is abstracted from rivers and aquifers
4. the water table falls and river flow drops
5. the remaining water is more concentrated with pollutants
6. less usable water is available than before, even though rainfall has not changed.

The clearest cautionary example: the Aral Sea

In 1960 the Aral Sea, in Central Asia, was one of the four largest lakes on Earth at about 68,000 square kilometres. Soviet planners diverted its two feeder rivers, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, to irrigate cotton across Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Inflow collapsed, the lake shrank, and by 2014 the eastern basin had dried completely for the first time in modern records.

The consequences are the whole syllabus statement in one place. Fishing towns such as Muynak are now tens of kilometres from any water and their fleets sit on dry sand. The exposed lake bed is a salt and pesticide desert, and windblown dust from it causes respiratory illness and contaminates farmland. The lake's moderating effect on the local climate has gone, so summers are hotter and winters colder. This is what "demonstrate that careful management is required" means: abstraction without management destroyed both the resource and the economy that depended on it.

7. The impact of a lack of access to clean water

The syllabus asks for the impact on local people and on the potential for economic development. Write both.

On local people

On the potential for economic development

This half is where answers thin out, so build it deliberately.

• Lost working days. A sick workforce is an unproductive one. Cambridge's own mark scheme credits "people need water to be fit to work" and "be productive".
• Lost school days, so literacy and skills stay low, so the country cannot move into higher value industry.
• Pressure on healthcare, with clinic budgets and beds absorbed by preventable illness. A mark scheme credits "reduces pressure on healthcare" as a benefit of clean supply, which is the same point in reverse.
• Industry will not locate there. Manufacturing, food processing, textiles, mining, brewing and power generation all need large, reliable, clean water. No water security means no investment.
• Agriculture stays at subsistence level, with one rain fed harvest instead of two or three irrigated ones, so there is no surplus to sell and no rural income.
• Tourism is deterred, both by the health risk and by the fact that hotels cannot be supplied.
• Capital is spent on emergencies rather than on development: tankers, imported bottled water, cholera response.
• A poverty cycle forms.

1. no clean water
2. waterborne disease and time lost fetching
3. children miss school and adults miss work
4. productivity and skills stay low
5. incomes and tax revenue stay low
6. the government cannot afford pipes, boreholes or treatment plants
7. still no clean water.

That single chain is the strongest thing you can put in a 7 mark answer on this statement, because it turns a list of impacts into an argument.

The figure that supports it. The WHO has estimated that every US$1 invested in water and sanitation returns roughly US$4 in reduced health costs and increased productivity. Attribute it, and use it as the reason a government should spend on supply rather than on treating the consequences.

8. Managing supply to ensure future supplies

Cambridge's 7 mark question on this topic has been printed as: "For a named country you have studied, explain how water supply is being managed to meet present and future demand." The mark scheme is levelled, with the standard note "Max 5 if no named or inappropriate example", and Level 3 requires "names of places and schemes within chosen area/country" plus "specific details/statistics".

Management divides into two halves, and the strongest answers do both.

8a. Increasing supply

Everything in section 5: new reservoirs, boreholes and aquifer development, desalination plants, rainwater harvesting, transfer schemes and pipelines, treatment plants, recycling and reuse, and leakage reduction. Cambridge's published list also includes tankers and bottled water, and, at the edge of credibility, cloud seeding.

8b. Managing demand

This is the half that makes an answer sustainable rather than merely expensive.

How to write the evaluation

Cambridge's decision making questions in this topic reward a specific shape, and the mark schemes tell you what it is. When a question offers you five strategies and asks which is best, marks are awarded for the advantages of the one you chose and the disadvantages of one you rejected, capped at three marks on each side. Choosing is free. Justifying is what scores.

The published disadvantages show the reasoning the examiner wants:

• A new reservoir near the city will not supply the rural areas or the rest of the country, and it takes farmland.
• Water treatment plants improve quality, not quantity, and need technology the country may lack.
• Desalination is only practical near the sea, and needs technology.
• Pipelines across the country cause environmental destruction, and need technology.
• Importing water leaves the country with nothing if relations with the trading partner break down, and creates plastic waste, and is not a permanent solution.

Two things are notable. First, every rejection is geographical, about where the water goes or where it can be built, not just about money. Second, the mark scheme explicitly refuses to credit an unqualified "cost" point, and refuses "it provides drinking water" as an advantage. Both are too generic. Say why the cost matters to that country and who the strategy fails to reach.

The judgement to write in your conclusion: increasing supply raises the ceiling but is expensive, slow and environmentally damaging, and every new source is eventually outgrown by demand. Managing demand is far cheaper, works within months rather than decades and produces no new environmental damage, but it cannot create water where there is none and it depends on public cooperation. Sustainable water supply needs both, plus protection of the source so that what is already there is not lost to pollution or over abstraction.

9. Case study: water supply in Singapore

The syllabus requires one case study of water supply in a country or area. Singapore is the strongest choice available, because it covers every method in the syllabus, it has been managed deliberately and publicly for sixty years, and the figures are published.

The problem

Singapore is a city state of about 734 square kilometres with roughly 5.9 million people. It has no natural lakes, no significant aquifer and no large river, and one of the highest population densities on Earth. Rainfall is high, around 2,300 mm a year, but there is nowhere to store it and no hinterland to draw from. For decades it depended on imported water from Johor, Malaysia, under a 1962 Water Agreement that allows Singapore to draw up to 250 million gallons a day of raw water and which expires in 2061. Dependence on a single foreign supplier, on a fixed deadline, is a national security problem as much as a water problem.

Total demand is around 440 million gallons a day, roughly 2 million cubic metres, and about half of that is non domestic. Demand is projected to almost double by 2065.

The management strategy: the Four National Taps

Singapore's national water agency, PUB, organises supply into four sources, deliberately so that no single one is critical.

Tap 1: local catchment. About two thirds of Singapore's entire land area is managed as water catchment, feeding 17 reservoirs. The Marina Barrage, completed in 2008, dammed the mouth of the Marina Channel to create the Marina Reservoir, the first in the city centre, which also keeps sea water out and controls flooding in low lying downtown areas. Urban drains and canals are treated as part of the supply network rather than as waste channels, which is why keeping them unpolluted is enforced strictly.

Tap 2: imported water. Raw water from the Johor River under the 1962 agreement, treated in Singapore. This is the tap Singapore is deliberately shrinking before 2061.

Tap 3: NEWater. Treated used water put through microfiltration, reverse osmosis and ultraviolet disinfection to produce water cleaner than the drinking standard. Introduced in 2003, there are now five NEWater plants, and NEWater can meet up to 40% of current demand. Most goes to industry, particularly wafer fabrication plants that need ultra pure water, with a small share blended into reservoirs during dry periods. PUB's target is 55% of demand by 2060.

Tap 4: desalinated water. The first plant, SingSpring at Tuas, opened in 2005. There are now five desalination plants, together able to meet up to 25% of demand, with a target of 30% by 2060.

Managing demand as well as supply

• Pricing. Water is charged at a rate designed to reflect the true cost of the next drop, including a Water Conservation Tax, and prices were revised upward in 2017 explicitly to restrain demand.
• Education. Sustained public campaigns, water rationing exercises in schools, and the Water Efficiency Labelling Scheme on taps, showerheads and washing machines.
• Leakage control. Singapore's unaccounted for water is around 5%, among the very lowest in the world, against 20% to 40% in many older cities.
• Results. Household use per person fell to about 141 litres a day in 2020, with a national target of 130 litres by 2030.

Evaluation

Singapore has bought genuine water security, and the design principle is the transferable lesson: four sources, none of them critical. NEWater and desalination are weather independent, so a drought in Johor no longer threatens the city, and that is exactly what "ensuring future supplies" means.

The costs are real. NEWater and desalination are both energy intensive, so Singapore's water security is partly bought with electricity and therefore with emissions, and PUB has said energy is the key constraint on expanding desalination further. The capital cost has been enormous, and it was affordable only because Singapore is a high income country: this model cannot simply be copied by a low income one, which is a point worth making in an evaluation. Devoting two thirds of a crowded island to catchment also constrains land use permanently. And the 2061 deadline has not gone away, it has only been made survivable.

10. Contrasting example: the Cape Town water crisis, 2015 to 2018

Use this alongside Singapore. It is a shortage, in a middle income country, that was managed successfully mostly by cutting demand, and it gives you a case where the answer was not a new dam.

The cause. Three consecutive years of poor winter rainfall from 2015 to 2017 in the Western Cape, on top of rapid population growth in Cape Town, drained the six dams of the Western Cape Water Supply System. Theewaterskloof, the largest, holds roughly half the system's storage and fell to a small fraction of capacity. By early 2018 total system storage was down to around 20%, and the last 10% is not usable.

Day Zero. The city announced a date on which municipal taps would be shut off and residents would queue at around 200 collection points for a rationed allowance. At its worst projection, in early 2018, Day Zero was set for 12 April 2018.

The management response.

• Level 6B restrictions from 1 February 2018 cut the personal allowance to 50 litres per person per day, roughly a two minute shower and nothing else.
• Steeply rising tariffs, so heavy users paid punitive rates.
• Pressure management across the network, which reduced both consumption and leakage at the same time.
• A public water map showing household by household compliance, which used social pressure directly.
• Agricultural allocations cut, transferring water from farms to the city, at the cost of the season's crop and of farm jobs.
• Emergency supply schemes: small desalination plants at Strandfontein, Monwabisi and the V&A Waterfront, plus abstraction from the Cape Flats and Table Mountain Group aquifers.

The outcome. City wide consumption fell from about 1.2 billion litres a day in 2015 to roughly 500 to 600 million litres a day by early 2018, a reduction of over half. Day Zero was pushed back repeatedly and then dropped, and good rains in mid 2018 refilled the dams.

Evaluation. Cape Town shows that demand management can work fast and at scale, which is not what most students assume. It also shows the cost: the restrictions damaged tourism and farming, the emergency desalination plants were expensive per litre and were later mothballed, and the poorest households, already using far less than 50 litres, carried restrictions aimed at behaviour that was not theirs. The deeper lesson is about timing. Supply schemes take a decade to build and the crisis arrived in three years, so the only lever available quickly was demand. A city that had diversified earlier, as Singapore did, would not have needed the lever at all.

11. How this topic is actually examined

From the past papers in this bank, question 6 on Paper 1 and question 5 or 6 on Paper 2 have used water repeatedly, in a consistent shape.

• 1 and 2 mark data questions off a map, a table or a graph. Identify the area most likely to struggle; describe the distribution of areas with enough water; calculate a number of people from a percentage and a world population; state which graph type suits the data. Read the resource, use its labels, and do not import outside knowledge where the question says "using Fig. 6.1 only".
• 3 mark describe questions. Describe the method of supply shown in each sketch. The credited answers were as plain as "rainfall harvesting, collecting rainwater and storing it in a container", "water pumped from an aquifer", and "a well, lowering buckets to the water". Name the method and say what it physically does. No more is needed.
• 3 and 4 mark explain questions. Why rural areas in LEDCs have a shortage; why it matters to increase clean supply; how supply can be managed year round in a place like California. These are marked one mark per separate valid idea, so give more distinct points rather than one long one. Four separate causes beat one cause explained four ways.
• 5 mark decision making questions. Choose a strategy, give its advantages, attack a rejected one. Marks are capped at three on each side, so cover both. Development of a point can score, so a point plus its consequence is worth writing.
• 7 mark levelled questions. "For a named country you have studied, explain how water supply is being managed to meet present and future demand." Level 1 is limited statements. Level 2 needs a named example and developed or linked statements. Level 3 needs place specific reference. The cap is printed plainly: "Max 5 if no named or inappropriate example".

A quirk worth knowing. The mark scheme for that 7 mark question carries a note from the examiners that the question read "country" but "should have read country/area to mirror the syllabus", and that an area was therefore accepted. Cambridge is not trying to catch you out on the scale of your case study. It is trying to establish that you have one.

12. Common exam mistakes

• Writing the rivers topic by mistake. Drainage basins, hydrographs, flooding and river landforms earn nothing on a water supply question.
• Naming a method without saying how it works. "Desalination" is a label. "Sea water is forced under pressure through a membrane that holds back the salt" is an answer.
• Giving no named example on the 7 mark question. The mark scheme caps you at 5.
• Naming a country but giving no detail inside it. Level 3 needs schemes, places, dates or figures. "Singapore manages water well" is a Level 2 sentence at best.
• Answering a decision making question with only advantages, or only disadvantages. Both sides are needed and each is capped at three.
• Writing "it is expensive" and stopping. The mark scheme rejects a bare cost point. Say who cannot afford it and what they do instead.
• Writing "it provides drinking water" as an advantage of a supply scheme. That is what every supply scheme does, so it is not a discriminating point.
• Confusing quality with quantity. A treatment plant makes water safe. It does not make more of it.
• Confusing physical and economic scarcity, and so treating every shortage as a rainfall problem when many are investment problems.
• Ignoring the proportions statement. Agriculture takes roughly 70% of global withdrawals, and a question can ask about that directly.
• Treating the impacts statement as health only. The syllabus also asks about the potential for economic development.
• Giving figures with no year attached. Water statistics date quickly and an undated number reads as invention.

13. Quick revision

• Two syllabus statements: methods of supply and proportions used by sector at different levels of development; and why shortages happen and why management is needed.
• Three named methods: reservoirs and dams, wells and boreholes, desalination. The word "including" means the list is open, so harvesting, transfer, treatment, tankers and recycling all count.
• Global withdrawals: agriculture about 70%, industry about 19%, domestic about 11%. Agriculture's share is highest in low income countries, industry's in high income ones.
• 97% of water is salt, most of the fresh remainder is frozen, under 1% is accessible.
• Physical scarcity means not enough water. Economic scarcity means not enough money and infrastructure to deliver it.
• Service ladder: safely managed, basic, limited, unimproved, surface water. Unimproved and surface water are marked on contamination. Basic and limited are marked on time lost.
• Impacts on people: waterborne disease, time and schooling lost, physical burden, safety, and the highest price per litre paid by the poorest.
• Impacts on development: lost working days, pressure on healthcare, no industrial investment, subsistence agriculture, and a poverty cycle.
• Management has two halves: increase supply, and manage demand through pricing, restriction, efficient irrigation, appliances, education and leakage repair.
• Case study Singapore: Four National Taps, catchment on two thirds of the land with 17 reservoirs, imported Johor water under the 1962 agreement expiring 2061, NEWater from 2003 at up to 40% of demand, and desalination from 2005 at up to 25%.
• Contrast Cape Town: 2015 to 2018 drought, Day Zero projected for 12 April 2018, 50 litres per person per day from February 2018, consumption more than halved, crisis averted.
• On 7 mark questions: named example, then developed statements, then place specific detail. "Max 5 if no named or inappropriate example."
• This topic is not in the 2027 syllabus. Its last examination is November 2026.

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