World Resource Institute Earth Trends - Water Withdrawal

This dataset contains World Resource Institute Earth Trends Water Withdrawal for the period 2020-2040. Data from World Resource Institute.

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WRI projected future country-level water stress for 2020, 2030, and 2040 under business-as-usual (BAU), optimistic, and pessimistic scenarios. Each tab lists country projected water stress scores for each scenario and year, weighted by overall water withdrawals. Scores weighted by individual sectors (agricultural, domestic, and industrial) are provided as well.

These global projections are best suited to making comparisons among countries for the same year and among scenarios and decades for the same region. More detailed and localized data or scenarios can better estimate potential outcomes for specific regions and expose large sub-national variations that are subsumed under countrywide water-stress values. The country indicators face persistent limitations in attempting to simplify complex information, such as spatial and temporal variations, into a single number. They also do not account for the governance and investment structure of the water sector in different countries. 

It is important to note the inherent uncertainty in estimating any future conditions, particularly those associated with climate change, future population and economic trends, and water demand. Additionally, care should be taken when examining the change rates of a country’s projected stress levels between one year and another, because the risk-score thresholds are not linear. For more information on these limitations, see the technical note.

Water Stress

withdrawals / available flow

Water stress measures total annual water withdrawals (municipal, industrial, and agricultural) expressed as a percentage of the total annual available blue water. Higher values indicate more competition among users.

Score Value

[0-1) Low (<10%)

[1-2) Low to medium (10-20%)

[2-3) Medium to high (20-40%)

[3-4) High (40-80%)

[4-5] Extremely high (>80%)