We’re (not) running out of water – a better way to measure water scarcity

By Kate Brauman

P.1 There’s a lot of water on the planet. Earth’s total renewable freshwater adds up to about
10 million cubic kilometers. That number is small, less than one percent, compared to all the
water in oceans and ice caps, but it’s also large, something like four trillion Olympic-sized
swimming pools. Then again, water isn’t available everywhere: across space, there are deserts
and swamps; over time, seasons of rain and years of drought.

2 Also, a water crisis isn’t about how much water there is – a desert isn’t water-stressed if
no one is using the water; it’s just an arid place. A water shortage happens when we want more
water than we have in a specific place at a specific time. So determining whether a given part of
the world is water-stressed is complicated. But it’s also important: we need to manage risk and
plan strategically. Is there a good way to measure water availability and, thereby, identify places
that could be vulnerable to water shortages?

3 The ratio of water use to water availability is a good way to quantify water shortage because
it measures whether we have enough. Working with a group of collaborators, some of whom run
a state-of-the-art global water resources model and some of whom work on the ground in water-
scarce places, I quantified just how much of our water we’re using on a global basis. It was less
straightforward than it sounds.

Water consumption, water availability

4 We use water for drinking and cleaning and making clothes and cars. Mostly, however, we
use water to grow food. Seventy percent of the water we pull from rivers, streams and aquifers,
and nearly 90 percent of the water we “use up,” is for irrigation.

5 How much water we use depends on what you mean by “use.” Tallying the water we
withdraw from rivers, lakes and aquifers makes sense for homes and farms, because that’s how
much water runs through our taps or sprinkles onto farm fields. But an awful lot of that water
flows down the drain. So it can be, and probably is, used again. In the U.S., wastewater from most
homes flows to treatment plants. After it’s cleaned, it’s released to rivers or lakes that are likely
someone else’s water source. My tap water in Minneapolis comes from the Mississippi River, and
all the water I flush goes through a wastewater treatment plant and back into the Mississippi
River, the drinking water source for cities all the way to New Orleans.

6 With most water “saving” technologies, less water is taken out of a river, but that also
means that less water is put back into the river. It makes a difference to your water bill – you had
to pump less water! However, your neighbor in the town downstream doesn’t care if that water
ran through your tap before it got to her. She cares only about how much total water there is in
the stream. If you took out less but also put back less so the total didn’t change, it doesn’t make a
difference to her.

7 So in our analysis, we decided to count all the water that doesn’t flow downstream, called
water consumption. Consumed water isn’t gone, but it’s not around for us to use again on this
turn of the water cycle. For example, when a farmer irrigates a field, some of the water evaporates
or moves through plants into the atmosphere and is no longer available to be used by a farm
downhill. We tallied that water, not the runoff 1 (which might go to that town downstream, or to
migrating birds!).

1
Runoff (n): Lluvia o cualquier líquido que llega a los ríos
 8 Our model calculated water consumption by people and agriculture all over the world. It
turns out that if a lot of water is being consumed in a watershed2, meaning that it’s used and can’t
be immediately reused, it’s being used for irrigation. But irrigated agriculture is super-
concentrated – 75 percent of water consumption by irrigation occurs in just 6 percent of all the
watersheds in the world. So in many watersheds, not much water is consumed at all – often it’s
fed back into the watershed after it’s used.

9 On the other hand, we had to keep track of how much water is available. Water availability
fluctuates, with flood peaks and dry seasons, so we counted up available water each month, not
just in average years but during wet and dry years as well. And we counted groundwater 3 as well
as surface water from rivers, lakes and wetlands.

10 In many places, rainfall and snowfall replenish groundwater each year. But in other places,
like the High Plains aquifer in the central United States, groundwater reserves were formed long
ago and effectively aren’t recharged. This fossil groundwater is a finite resource, so using it is
fundamentally unsustainable; for our measure of water shortage, we considered only renewable
groundwater and surface water.

Water shortage or water stress?

11 We analyzed how much of the available renewable water in a watershed we’re using up for
over 15,000 watersheds worldwide for each month in wet and in dry years. With those data in
hand, my colleagues and I started trying to interpret it. We wanted to identify parts of the world
facing water stress all the time, during dry seasons, or only in drought years.

12 But it turns out that identifying and defining water stress is tough, too. Just because a
place is using up a lot of its water – maybe a city pulls most of the water out of a river every
summer – that doesn’t necessarily mean it is water-stressed. Culture, governance and
infrastructure determine whether a limit on water availability is problematic. And this context
influences whether consuming 55 percent of available water is demonstrably worse than using
50 percent, or whether two short months of water shortage is twice as bad as one. Demarcating
water scarcity transforms water shortage into a value-laden4 evaluation of water stress.

13 To evaluate whether a watershed is stressed, we considered the common use-to-

availability thresholds5 of 20 percent and 40 percent to define moderate and severe water
scarcity. Those levels are most often attributed to Malin Falkenmark, who did groundbreaking
work assessing water for people. When we were doing our research, we found Waclaw Balcerski.
His 1964 study (published in a Hungarian water resources journal) of postwar Europe showed
the cost of building water infrastructure increased in countries withdrawing more than 20
percent of their available water. Interesting, but hardly a universal definition of water stress.

2
Watershed (n): Las tierras altas que separan dos sistemas fluviales; cuenca
3
Groundwater (n): Aguas subterráneas
4
Value-laden (adj): Que utiliza un conjunto de valores particulares
5
Threshold (n): umbral