Development of water safety risk matrices to improve water safety in Arctic drinking water systems in Nunavut, Canada.

Abstract

Safe drinking water is key to individual and community health. Water safety is often evaluated based on whether or not a community's drinking water meets the quality standards specified by a governing authority. These water quality standards address many microbial and chemical water safety risks but may not capture risks that are difficult to quantify or community-specific needs and preferences. Water safety planning, first introduced by the World Health Organization, is a more holistic approach that aims to integrate water system stakeholders, system mapping, hazard identification and matrices to better characterise risk. In this study, we documented previous efforts to apply water WSPs in Arctic jurisdictions and evaluated existing risk scoring systems for potential application to Nunavut, an Arctic territory in Canada. The observations from the evaluation informed the development of a preliminary WSP framework for Nunavut which considers both past frequency and the existing hazard barriers in place when determining the likelihood score.