Global Water Scarcity in Relation to the International Energy Trade of Thailand

Abstract

SummaryIt is predicted that energy requirements in developing countries will increase global water consumption as a result of implementation of new power generation systems, and to population growth of the middle classes. Thus, it is anticipated that increased regional energy consumption will likely increase global water scarcity as a result of the consequent international energy trade. The degree of impact, however, depends on the degree of water scarcity in the energy-export regions. Therefore, the impact on global water scarcity by the international energy trade of Thailand was evaluated, using virtual water flow, and considering water scarcity. First, the amount of natural gas, crude oil, coal, and electricity imported and exported by each country was determined from energy and trading statistics. Concurrently, a database of water withdrawn per unit of energy production was built using commodity and water scarcity indices by country. Next, standard, scarcity-weighted, and region-based scarcity-weighted virtual water flows were calculated using a bottom-up approach. From this, the net virtual water import (NVWI) was determined to be 1,267 to 7,353 million cubic meters (m 3 ), whereas the stress-weighted and region-based stressweighted NVWIs were determined to be from −2 to 1,820, and −4 to 3,696 million m 3 , respectively, over the past 20 years. It was found that, although the amount of virtual water import for the power generation was significant, imported crude oil was the greatest contributor to global water scarcity. Finally, the implications of these results for policy to prevent global water scarcity are considered, with discussion of the usability and uncertainty, of the water scarcity index. Keywords:bottom-up approach industrial ecology scarcity-weighted virtual water flow water-energy nexus water scarcity index Supporting information is available on the JIE Web site

Linking Local Consumption to Global Impacts

“…We find an exciting range of environmental footprints in this special issue. There are a few studies that move a step further to model environmental impacts (Okadera et al 2015), which allows one to make the link from consumption and behavior to environmental consequences elsewhere explicit. (4) Socioeconomic impacts.…”

“…) and Thailand (Okadera et al. ), sanitation services, and export production (Islam et al. ; Jiang et al.…”

“…), life cycle assessment (LCA) (Okadera et al. ), and ecological network analysis (Zhang Y. et al. ), sometimes in combination with an input‐output (I‐O) table (IOT).…”

“…Okadera and colleagues (), in “Global water scarcity in relation to the international energy trade of Thailand,” explore the energy‐water nexus by using bottom‐up approaches to estimate scarcity‐weighted virtual water flows. They find that imported crude oil was the greatest contributor to global water scarcity.…”

“…This group of articles focuses on environmental impacts associated with a range of economic sectors, including cereal production in France (Courtonne et al 2016), crops in China (Zhang L. et al 2016a), Spanish tourism (Cazcarro et al 2016), the global higher education sector (Lang and Kennedy 2016), energy production in China (Zhang Y. et al 2016b) and Thailand (Okadera et al 2015), sanitation services, and export production (Islam et al 2016;Jiang et al 2016). Multiregional input-output (MRIO) tables are used or discussed in more than half of the articles, other approaches such as panel data regression (Islam et al 2016), material flow analysis (MFA) (Courtonne et al 2016), optimization tools (Zhang Y. et al 2016b), life cycle assessment (LCA) (Okadera et al 2015), and ecological network analysis (Zhang Y. et al 2016b), sometimes in combination with an input-output (I-O) table (IOT).…”