Sustainability of global water use: past reconstruction and future projections

By Yoshihide Wada, Marc F. P. Bierkens. 2014

444 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Overuse of surface water and an increasing reliance on nonrenewable groundwater resources have been reported over various regions of the world, casting significant doubt on the sustainable water supply and food production met by irrigation. To assess the limitations of global water resources, numerous indicators have been developed, but they rarely consider nonrenewable water use. In addition, surface water over-abstraction is rarely assessed in the context of human and environmental water needs. Here, we perform a transient assessment of global water use over the historical period 1960–2010 as well as the future projections of 2011–2099, using a newly developed indicator: the blue water sustainability index (BlWSI). The BlWSI incorporates both nonrenewable groundwater use and nonsustainable water use that compromises environmental flow requirements. Our results reveal an increasing trend of water consumed from nonsustainable surface water and groundwater resources over the historical period (∼30%), and this increase is projected to continue further towards the end of this century (∼40%). The global amount of nonsustainable water consumption has been increasing especially since the late 1990s, despite a wetter climate and increasing water availability during this period. The BlWSI is the first tool suitable for consistently evaluating the renewability and degradation of surface water and groundwater resources as a result of human water over-abstraction.

Subfields: Ocean Engineering, Water Science and Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ae49b5f4aeacfdcf3e2d4da2a9563bc18094e8c3

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In Ocean Engineering

In Water Science and Technology

Citations in the corpus

Measuring global water security towards sustainable development goals (2016, background): “However, compared to water scarcity assessment (Wada et al 2011b, Wada and Bierkens 2014,Wada et al 2014a), this study shows heterogonous distribution of water security.”
Global exposure and vulnerability to multi-sector development and climate change hotspots (2018, methodology): “w2 Non-renewable GW abstraction index Non-renewable groundwater stress index (w2) is calculated as the fraction of total groundwater abstraction that is nonrenewable using data from Wada and Bierkens [11], [12].”
Climate Change Impacts on Water and Agriculture Sectors in Southern Africa: Threats and Opportunities for Sustainable Development (2020, background): “Sustainable utilization of water resources is paramount in contributing to agriculture production and economic development [42] in the face of climate change.”
PCR-GLOBWB 2: a 5 arcmin global hydrological and water resources model (2017, background): “, 2013), current and future water scarcity under climate change and increasing population growth (Hanasaki et al., 2008b; Wada et al., 2011a, b; Schewe et al., 2014; Haddeland et al., 2014; Wada and Bierkens, 2014), teleconnections between climate oscillations and water availability (Wanders and Wad”
Integrated crop water management might sustainably halve the global food gap (2016, result): “Our estimates of irrigation withdrawal and consumption agree well with previous estimates (FAO 2014, Döll et al 2014, Wada and Bierkens 2014), albeit featuring much more process detail.”