Human water consumption intensifies hydrological drought worldwide

By Yoshihide Wada, L. V. van Beek, N. Wanders, Marc F. P. Bierkens. 2012

384 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Over the past 50 years, human water use has more than doubled and affected streamflow over various regions of the world. However, it remains unclear to what degree human water consumption intensifies hydrological drought (the occurrence of anomalously low streamflow). Here, we quantify over the period 1960–2010 the impact of human water consumption on the intensity and frequency of hydrological drought worldwide. The results show that human water consumption substantially reduced local and downstream streamflow over Europe, North America and Asia, and subsequently intensified the magnitude of hydrological droughts by 10–500%, occurring during nation- and continent-wide drought events. Also, human water consumption alone increased global drought frequency by 27 (±6)%. The intensification of drought frequency is most severe over Asia (35 ± 7%), but also substantial over North America (25 ± 6%) and Europe (20 ± 5%). Importantly, the severe drought conditions are driven primarily by human water consumption over many parts of these regions. Irrigation is responsible for the intensification of hydrological droughts over the western and central US, southern Europe and Asia, whereas the impact of industrial and households’ consumption on the intensification is considerably larger over the eastern US and western and central Europe. Our findings reveal that human water consumption is one of the more important mechanisms intensifying hydrological drought, and is likely to remain as a major factor affecting drought intensity and frequency in the coming decades.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Ocean Engineering, Water Science and Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7069035de9ed8a0f18afc6ca8eafc54a22e062e5

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Citations in the corpus

Measuring global water security towards sustainable development goals (2016, methodology): “Therefore, we combine the blue WSI (Wada et al 2014b)with twomore indicators: groundwater depletion (Wada et al 2012) and the drought index (Wada et al 2013), to obtain amore comprehensive notion of water availability (figure 1).”
High‐resolution modeling of human and climate impacts on global water resources (2016, background): “…MODELING OF GLOBAL WATER 751 observations [Wada et al., 2012a, 2014], simulated low-flow or drought characteristics against GRDC observations [Wada et al., 2013], estimated sectoral water withdrawal and consumption for livestock, irrigation, industry and households against the FAO AQUASTAT…”
Water stress in global transboundary river basins: significance of upstream water use on downstream stress (2016, positive): “To calculate the water availability in each SBA, we used the average annual river discharge over the period of 1960 – 2010 based on PCR-GLOBWB 30 arc-min model results ( Wada et al 2011a, 2013 ) .”
Sustainability of global water use: past reconstruction and future projections (2014, methodology): “…demand, withdrawal and consumption (water withdrawal minus return flow) from livestock, irrigation, industrial and domestic sectors were estimated (Wada et al 2011a, 2013b, 2014) over the 0.5° global grid using the latest available historical data and future projections on socio-economic (e.g.,…”
Non-renewable groundwater use and groundwater depletion: a review (2019, background): “If persistent enough, a meteorological drought will propagate through the hydrological system by causing abnormally low soil moisture contents and evaporation (agricultural drought), reduced groundwater recharge and low water tables (groundwater drought) and finally declining groundwater discharge t”
A hybrid framework for assessing socioeconomic drought: Linking climate variability, local resilience, and demand (2015, background): “Human influence on the hydrological cycle and redistribution of water [Wada et al., 2013] is already apparent, as can be seen in Figure 1, where comparison of the natural inflow to Shasta Lake in California and its controlled outflow shows a shift in the maximummean monthly runoff from March to…”