TY - JOUR
T1 - Towards a global water scarcity risk assessment framework
T2 - Incorporation of probability distributions and hydro-climatic variability
AU - Veldkamp, T. I.E.
AU - Wada, Y.
AU - Aerts, J. C.J.H.
AU - Ward, P. J.
N1 - Funding Information:
TIEV, JCJHA, and PJW designed research; TIEV and YW prepared datasets; TIEV analyzed data; and TIEV, YW, JCJHA, and PJW wrote the paper.Environ. Res. Lett. 11 (2016) 024006 The research leading to this article is partly funded by the EU 7th Framework Programme through the projects ENHANCE (grant agreement no. 308438) and Earth2Observe (grant agreement no. 603608). J Aerts received funding from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) VICI (grant no. 453-14-006). Y Wada is supported by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Oversea Research Fellowship (grant no. JSPS-2014-878). P Ward received funding from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) in the form of a VENI grant (grant no. 863-11-011). None of the authors of this article have a competing financial interest.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 IOP Publishing Ltd.
Copyright:
Copyright 2018 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2016/2/2
Y1 - 2016/2/2
N2 - Changing hydro-climatic and socioeconomic conditions increasingly put pressure on fresh water resources and are expected to aggravate water scarcity conditions towards the future. Despite numerous calls for risk-based water scarcity assessments, a global-scale framework that includes UNISDR's definition of risk does not yet exist. This study provides a first step towards such a risk-based assessment, applying a Gamma distribution to estimate water scarcity conditions at the global scale under historic and future conditions, using multiple climate change and population growth scenarios. Our study highlights that water scarcity risk, expressed in terms of expected annual exposed population, increases given all future scenarios, up to >56.2% of the global population in 2080. Looking at the drivers of risk, we find that population growth outweigh the impacts of climate change at global and regional scales. Using a risk-based method to assess water scarcity, we show the results to be less sensitive than traditional water scarcity assessments to the use of fixed threshold to represent different levels of water scarcity. This becomes especially important when moving from global to local scales, whereby deviations increase up to 50% of estimated risk levels.
AB - Changing hydro-climatic and socioeconomic conditions increasingly put pressure on fresh water resources and are expected to aggravate water scarcity conditions towards the future. Despite numerous calls for risk-based water scarcity assessments, a global-scale framework that includes UNISDR's definition of risk does not yet exist. This study provides a first step towards such a risk-based assessment, applying a Gamma distribution to estimate water scarcity conditions at the global scale under historic and future conditions, using multiple climate change and population growth scenarios. Our study highlights that water scarcity risk, expressed in terms of expected annual exposed population, increases given all future scenarios, up to >56.2% of the global population in 2080. Looking at the drivers of risk, we find that population growth outweigh the impacts of climate change at global and regional scales. Using a risk-based method to assess water scarcity, we show the results to be less sensitive than traditional water scarcity assessments to the use of fixed threshold to represent different levels of water scarcity. This becomes especially important when moving from global to local scales, whereby deviations increase up to 50% of estimated risk levels.
KW - climate change
KW - global hydrological modeling
KW - probabilistic methods
KW - risk assessment
KW - socioeconomic developments
KW - water resources
KW - water scarcity
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84959440159&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1088/1748-9326/11/2/024006
DO - 10.1088/1748-9326/11/2/024006
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84959440159
VL - 11
JO - Environmental Research Letters
JF - Environmental Research Letters
SN - 1748-9318
IS - 2
M1 - 024006
ER -