Economically challenged and water scarce: identification of global populations most vulnerable to water crises

ABSTRACT

The best available high-resolution precipitation, GDP, available freshwater and withdrawal data sets are used in a combined global analysis of physical and economic water scarcity at 50 km resolution. We find that approximately 40.7 million people are living in areas with concurrent severe economic and water-scarcity constraints. These areas are mostly in semi-arid parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia.

KEYWORDS:

• Water stress
• available freshwater resources
• water withdrawals
• GDP
• virtual water trade
• grid analysis

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank Dr C. R. Ferguson of the University at Albany, SUNY, for his support to finalize the draft. The first author feels great honour and acknowledges Dr Asit Biswas for his generous offer to accept this work for his Festschrift, because Dr Biswas has been a mentor on the fundamental issues of how we should tackle and understand world water issues, and develop and propose policy-relevant solutions, for more than two decades, since the Next Generation Water Leaders programme, which Dr Biswas organized with the Nippon Foundation and prepared for the 2nd World Water Forum in 2000.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/07900627.2019.1698413.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science [KAKENHI; 16H06291].