Water for the Future or a Future for Water?

While smart water technologies offer promising tools for advancing the global water security indicators of Sustainable Development Goal 6 (Clean Water and Sanitation), ethical discussions in this area rightly focus on access, privacy, and governance. However, a more fundamental question is often overlooked: Is the water being ethically delivered and monitored ultimately used for more sustainable purposes? Unlike other resources, water is often not consumed through use; instead, it is displaced, degraded, or sequestered, making it a paradoxical candidate for sustainability. This chapter argues that smart water ethics must include upstream evaluation of water’s end uses. It examines how ordinal ranking scales can help assess which uses of water are more or less sustainable over generational timescales, thereby informing policy- and decision-making about those uses. Framing water as a long-term investment, the chapter proposes that returns from smart water applications (particularly in municipal and industrial contexts) can be treated as "savings" and then allocated to water-insecure regions through infrastructure, social, and environmental development. In this way, the surplus from otherwise exclusively industrial/municipal smart water applications can benefit the rural/agricultural sectors, especially in the Global South.