Baseline water stress

In response to growing concerns from private sector actors around water availability, water quality, climate change, and increasing demand, World Resources Institute developed Aqueduct Global Maps to help decision-makers identify areas with higher exposure to water-related risks. Aqueduct employs the composite index approach as a robust communication tool to translate hydrological data into intuitive indicators of water-related risks. 12 indicators were grouped into a framework identifying spatial variation in water risks for 15,006 subcatchments.

Baseline water stress measures total annual water withdrawals (municipal, industrial, and agricultural) expressed as a percent of the total annual available flow. Higher values indicate more competition among users. Arid areas with low water use are shown in grey, but scored as high stress when calculating aggregated scores.

Source: Gassert, F., M. Landis, M. Luck, P. Reig, and T. Shiao. 2014. “Aqueduct Global Maps 2.1.” Working Paper. Washington, DC: World Resources Institute. Available here [https://www.wri.org/resources/data-sets/aqueduct-global-maps-21-data].

Year of content: 2010

Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/]

Data and Resources

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Additional Info

Field	Value
Source	https://app.mapx.org/static.html?views=MX-U0277-AF2G4-AG4C5&zoomToViews=true#JAAc6
Author	UNEP/GRID-Geneva
Maintainer	UNEP/GRID-Geneva
Last Updated	December 7, 2022, 08:20 (UTC)
Created	December 7, 2022, 08:20 (UTC)
GUID	MX-U0277-AF2G4-AG4C5
Issued	2019-01-08 18:44:24
Language	EN
Modified	2022-07-21 15:06:41
Publisher email	info@mapx.org
Publisher name	UNEP/GRID-Geneva
Theme	Web Map
data_type	geospatial
keywords_m49	WLD
projects_description	NEAT+ Global
projects_id	MX-WJO-FOV-NNB-1BN-SZN
projects_title	NEAT+ Global
range_end_at_year	2022
range_start_at_year	2010
source_abstract	The availability of freshwater resources to meet human demands has emerged as a top-tier global issue for both environment and development. However, many decision-makers lack the technical expertise to fully understand hydrological information. In response to growing concerns from private sector actors around water availability, water quality, climate change, and increasing demand, we employed the composite index approach as a robust communication tool to translate hydrological data into intuitive indicators of water- related risks. We grouped 12 indicators into a framework identifying spatial variation in water risks. For 6 of the 12 indicators, we used an ensemble of time series estimators, spatial regression, and a sparse hydrological model to generate novel data sets of water supply and use. We adapted the remaining six indicators from existing publications. We chose aggregation methods to maximize transparency and communicability, and to allow for dynamic weighting to reflect different users’ sensitivities to water-related risks. We are currently unable to validate overall index scores because no datasets of water-related losses exist in the public domain. Data availability, specifically for major infrastructure (e.g., inter-basin transfers) and in-situ water quality and river gauge measurements, is the primary constraining factor in model accuracy. The resulting Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas (Aqueduct) is a publicly available, global database and interactive tool that maps indicators of water-related risks. Aqueduct enables comparison across large geographies to identify regions or assets deserving of closer attention. This paper documents the methodology used to generate the hydrological metrics and indicators in the Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas (see Reig et al. 2013 for explanation of the Aqueduct framework and indicator selection). The data and maps are publicly available so that others may build off this effort.
source_title	Baseline water stress
spatial	WLD