Presentation short abstract

Interviews, photovoice, and cascade diagrams reveal desalination as a risk system that restructures island life, generating new dependencies, ecological pressures, and persistent inequalities. Islanders’ perspectives show it reorganizes scarcity and reinforces uneven vulnerability to risk.

Presentation long abstract

Desalination is rapidly expanding across Caribbean islands, even as its emergent risks remain poorly understood. Using interviews (35), photovoice (10), and islander-generated cascade diagrams (3), this research examines how desalination in the San Andrés and Providencia Archipelago, Colombia interacts with socioecological processes that co-produce water risks and geographies. Results reveal that desalination is reshaping everyday water practices and creating new forms of vulnerability. Daily routines are increasingly coordinated around technological availability rather than traditional water cycles, as hazards shift from climatic (drought) to technological (plant, and pipeline failures). Interviews show limited understanding of desalination processes and the persistence of water injustices. Hotels and some households now operate private desalination units, intensifying inequalities. Traditionally, households store rain, well, or trucked water, so desalinated water is mixed with these sources, reducing its quality and intended benefits. Photovoice images further reveal a tangled water life of tubes, schedules, pumps, and flooding, alongside the cultural value of the sea and rainwater. Cascade diagrams co-developed with islanders trace how desalinated water infrastructure triggers cascading effects on health, ecosystems, and tourism. It identifies feedback dynamics: extraction for desalination drives salinization of the aquifer, and higher salinity leads to greater dependence on desalination, increased extraction, and further salinization. Rainfall, by contrast, reduces aquifer salinity, increase water availability, lowers the energy cost of desalination; but these dynamics remains unexamined and unaddressed. Ultimately, households continue to receive mixed, inconsistent, and low-quality water. Desalination is not resolving scarcity but reorganizing it while reinforcing uneven vulnerability to risk.