The world’s road to water scarcity: shortage and stress in the 20th century and pathways towards sustainability
By Matti Kummu, Joseph H. A. Guillaume, H. de Moel, S. Eisner, Martina Flörke, M. Porkka, Stefan Siebert, T. Veldkamp, Philip J. Ward. Scientific Reports, 2016
798 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Water scarcity is a rapidly growing concern around the globe, but little is known about how it has developed over time. This study provides a first assessment of continuous sub-national trajectories of blue water consumption, renewable freshwater availability, and water scarcity for the entire 20th century. Water scarcity is analysed using the fundamental concepts of shortage (impacts due to low availability per capita) and stress (impacts due to high consumption relative to availability) which indicate difficulties in satisfying the needs of a population and overuse of resources respectively. While water consumption increased fourfold within the study period, the population under water scarcity increased from 0.24 billion (14% of global population) in the 1900s to 3.8 billion (58%) in the 2000s. Nearly all sub-national trajectories show an increasing trend in water scarcity. The concept of scarcity trajectory archetypes and shapes is introduced to characterize the historical development of water scarcity and suggest measures for alleviating water scarcity and increasing sustainability. Linking the scarcity trajectories to other datasets may help further deepen understanding of how trajectories relate to historical and future drivers, and hence help tackle these evolving challenges.
Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Ocean Engineering, Water Science and Technology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d19476bcd8d0746c49cee2a6348377b0667e54b0
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Citations in the corpus
- Food loss and Waste Reduction as an Integral Part of a Circular Economy (2017, background): “FLW is also a significant economic loss when we account for the time invested in the production and supply chain, as well as in preparing the land, the use of fertilizers, and other costs caused by agricultural production (Bahadur et al., 2016; Kummu et al., 2016; Shafiee-Jood and Cai, 2016).”
- Water Scarcity and Sustainability in an Emerging Economy: A Management Perspective for Future (2020, background): “Eighty percent of the population in the 24 main cities of Pakistan do not have accessibility to clean water, for instance, in Karachi, m re than 16 million of people do not have a cess to clean water [22].”
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- Global unsustainable virtual water flows in agricultural trade (2019, background): “In the last decade, many studies have shown that some of the world’s major agricultural baskets rely on unsustainable water use for irrigation (Gleick and Palaniappan 2010, Konikow 2011, Gleeson et al 2012, Scanlon et al 2012, Kummu et al 2016, Mekonnen and Hoekstra 2016).”