Distributive questions concerning the allocation of water have long been highly contested – think here of debates over the waters of the Nile or, in our own case, in Australia over access and control over the Murray-Darling Basin. What counts as a fair or just way of allocating water, both as a benefit and as a burden? Climate change exacerbates these questions of justice. In this paper I shall explore the relevance of sufficientarianism to the problem of water and distributive justice. According to the sufficientarian, what matters is providing everyone with their basic needs. Rather than being concerned directly with inequalities as such or with making the situation of the least well off as good as possible, sufficientarian justice aims at making sure that each of us has enough. To what extent is this an appropriate model for distribution in the case of water? In particular, how might we determine the sufficiency threshold with respect to water and how might we trade off questions of sufficiency with other social and political goals? I shall also consider whether the arguments in favour of sufficientarianism provided generalise beyond the allocation of water to questions of distributive justice more generally.
