Interdisciplinary Insight. Connecting global trends to local realities.
JustWater opens avenues for human geography, political ecology, and international political economy to present a groundbreaking framework that links water footprint with local political and social dynamics, allowing local explorations about how water scarcity and power struggles unfold on the ground. Providing more than 600 geo localized points derived by Aqueduct 4.0, it shows where water in Italy is subject to water table decline, drought risk, water depletion and water scarcity, overlapping the results with irrigated blue water data from the latest Water Footprint Dataset (Mialyk et al 2024 / May 2025 update).
Gender & Water. Unveiling hidden inequalities.
By integrating gender analysis with virtual water research, JustWater exposes significant imbalances in land ownership and water management roles, highlighting the gender disparities faced by women farmers and workers in Italy’s agricultural and water sectors, an area traditionally overlooked in global water studies.
The spatial turn of virtual water: reconnecting water footprint and virtual water studies with hydro-social territories and narratives.
JustWATER attempts to reconnect the scholarship of virtual water with those of political ecologies of water, examining not only contested hydro-social territories of virtual water (Vos, J., & Hinojosa 2017) but also silenced and non-contested cases of water overabstracton , water extractivism, water grabbing and paradoxical virtual water trade where exports occurr from water scarce areas and vulnerable water bodies.
