MAPPING WORLD WATER RISKS

An Incredibly Detailed Map Shows The Potential Of Global Water Risks; …a new tool…lets you see all the bad things that might stem from water, from droughts to floods and beyond.

May 2013 (World Resources Institute)

“…[T]he drought that hit the U.S. in 2012…was a big deal…53% of the country was dealing with…moderate to extreme drought…by July. Over 1,000 counties were declared federal disaster areas…Aqueduct, a new map from the World Resources Institute (WRI), throws the world’s growing water woes into stark relief…[The water issue] is emerging as one of the defining challenges of the 21st century…

“The project, created with an alliance of companies including GE, Goldman Sachs, Shell, and Procter & Gamble, is the highest high-resolution map of global water stress available today. It’s also the first water-risk mapping tool to include a layer for groundwater data…”

click to enlarge

“WRI’s free map uses 2010 data (the most current data available) to measure a number of categories of water risk around the world: physical risk; variability in available water from year to year, which looks at flood occurrences (how often and how intense); severity of droughts (how long and how severe), groundwater stress, pollution pressure, demand for water treatment, media coverage about water issues (meaning how much attention is given to water in a given area), and more…

“…Places that haven’t traditionally had high water risks--the East Coast of the United States, the upper Midwest, Europe--now have medium to high water risk…because of changes in water demand, withdrawal patterns, weather, and water-supply patterns…[P]laces where there’s already high competition for water (i.e. India) are at serious risk when combined with annual variability in water…”

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