Is physical water scarcity a new phenomenon? Global assessment of water shortage over the last two millennia

Kummu, Matti; Ward, Philip J.; Moel, Hans de; Varis, Olli

doi:10.1088/1748-9326/5/3/034006

Cited by 377 publications

(237 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…Current hydrological literature often focuses on Bwater scarcity^(the bottom line for human populations rather than drought), in particular per capita water availability (Arnell 2004;Arnell et al 2011;Gosling and Arnell 2013;Kummu et al 2010) or a withdrawals-to-availability ratio (Gosling and Arnell 2013;Hanasaki et al 2013;Vörösmarty et al 2000). The impact of such scarcity on particular populations is then evaluated in terms of the numbers of people falling below a threshold value of water availability (e.g., 1000 m 3 /capita/year) or that exceed a certain withdrawals-to-availability ratio (exceeding 0.4 is seen as water stress or severe water limitation).…”

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confidence: 99%

The relative importance of climate change and population growth for exposure to future extreme droughts

et al. 2016

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The human consequences of drought are normally addressed in terms of Bwater scarcity^originating from human water use. In these terms, a common prediction to the next few decades is that population growth, not climate change, will be the dominant factor determining numbers living under such scarcity. Here we address the relative importance of increasing human caused extreme drought and increasing population for numbers of humans likely to be directly exposed in the future to such drought. Using the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) in conjunction with an ensemble of 16 CMIP5 climate models we find that, by 2081-2100 under the high emissions scenario RCP 8.5, average worldwide monthly population exposed to extreme drought (SPEI < -2) will increase by 386.8 million to 472.3 million (+426.6% from the current 89.7 million). Anthropogenic climate change is responsible for approximately 230.0 million (59.5%) of that increase with population growth responsible for only 35.5 million (9.2%); the climate change-population growth interaction explains the remaining 121.1 million (31.4%). At the national level, 129 countries will experience increase in drought exposure mainly due to climate change alone; 23 countries primarily due to population growth; and 38 countries primarily due to the interaction between climate change and population growth. Given inherently large uncertainties, projections of future climate impacts should be accepted with caution especially those directed to the regional level, to future population trends, and, of course, where technological, social and security changes are possible.

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The relative importance of climate change and population growth for exposure to future extreme droughts

et al. 2016

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“…Kummu et al (2010) avaliaram a escassez de água entre os anos 0 e 2005 d.C. em 284 bacias hidrográficas. Tomando como base o indicador de Falkenmark (Falkenmark;Lundqvist;Widstrand, 1989), os autores constataram que em 1800 a escassez era um problema que pouco afetava as populações ao redor da Terra.…”

Section: Revisão Da Literaturaunclassified

“…Essa bacia tem na agroindústria uma atividade importante, necessitando de água para a irrigação de culturas, processamento de alimentos e abastecimento urbano. Essa é uma situação que vem afetando diferentes países, conforme indicado pela pesquisa de Kummu et al (2010), o que é corroborado pelo trabalho de Wada et al (2013) ao avaliar que nos últimos cinquenta anos, a demanda de água mais do que dobrou, especialmente pelo incremento do consumo humano.…”

Section: Revisão Da Literaturaunclassified

“…Ainda que essa redução da disponibilidade de água esteja sendo relacionada a um período de estiagem e de temperaturas muito acima das normais climatológicas para esta épo-ca do ano, ela é o reflexo da falta de planejamento estratégico que afeta o sistema de abastecimento da Região nos últimos dez anos. Embora essa escassez reflita um fenômeno que vem ocorrendo há alguns anos em outras regiões (Hadas;Gal, 2014;Zaimes;Emmanouloudis, 2012;Kummu et al, 2010), ela pode ser reduzida com um planejamento estratégico adequado que leve em consideração informações climáticas na concepção de ações. Há exemplos que ilustram essa possibilidade, como o estudo de cenários estratégicos empreendido por Hejazi et al (2014) e que verificou a tendência de um aumento da escassez hídrica em diversos países, ou o estudo de Bolson e Broad (2013) sobre o gerenciamento de recursos hídricos na Flórida.…”

Section: Introductionunclassified

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Crise de abastecimento de água em São Paulo e falta de planejamento estratégico

Côrtes

Torrente

Pinto³

et al. 2015

Estud. av.

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Embora a crise no abastecimento de água na Região Metropolitana de São Paulo (RMSP) tenha se manifestado de maneira mais intensa no verão de 2013-2014, ela revela um problema crônico que vem afetando toda a Região nos últimos dez anos. Esse problema foi gerado pela falta de um planejamento estratégico que considere questões climatológicas que podem indicar, com meses de antecedência, problemas de recomposição dos níveis dos mananciais, permitindo que ações sejam empreendidas com razoável antecedência, reduzindo os impactos para a população. Este estudo mostra como é possível utilizar informações climáticas na gestão estratégica do sistema de abastecimento da RMSP.

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“…In the computation of operational drought indicators, the available water is often represented by the streamflow, or a fraction of it, and the water need is usually quantified by a standard per capita or by a fixed nominal demand (Falkenmark et al, 1989;Raskin et al, 1997). Depending on the application scope, operational drought indicators are either river-basin-specific (Garrote et al, 2007;Haro-Monteagudo et al, 2017) or used in studies covering continental or global areas with an annual time resolution (Yang et al, 2003;Oki and Kanae, 2006;Alcamo et al, 2007;Kummu et al, 2010).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automatic design of basin-specific drought indexes for highly regulated water systems

Zaniolo

Giuliani

Castelletti

et al. 2018

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

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Abstract. Socio-economic costs of drought are progressively increasing worldwide due to undergoing alterations of hydro-meteorological regimes induced by climate change. Although drought management is largely studied in the literature, traditional drought indexes often fail at detecting critical events in highly regulated systems, where natural water availability is conditioned by the operation of water infrastructures such as dams, diversions, and pumping wells. Here, ad hoc index formulations are usually adopted based on empirical combinations of several, supposed-to-be significant, hydro-meteorological variables. These customized formulations, however, while effective in the design basin, can hardly be generalized and transferred to different contexts. In this study, we contribute FRIDA (FRamework for Index-based Drought Analysis), a novel framework for the automatic design of basin-customized drought indexes. In contrast to ad hoc empirical approaches, FRIDA is fully automated, generalizable, and portable across different basins. FRIDA builds an index representing a surrogate of the drought conditions of the basin, computed by combining all the relevant available information about the water circulating in the system identified by means of a feature extraction algorithm. We used the Wrapper for Quasi-Equally Informative Subset Selection (W-QEISS), which features a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm to find Pareto-efficient subsets of variables by maximizing the wrapper accuracy, minimizing the number of selected variables, and optimizing relevance and redundancy of the subset. The preferred variable subset is selected among the efficient solutions and used to formulate the final index according to alternative model structures. We apply FRIDA to the case study of the Jucar river basin (Spain), a drought-prone and highly regulated Mediterranean water resource system, where an advanced drought management plan relying on the formulation of an ad hoc "state index" is used for triggering drought management measures. The state index was constructed empirically with a trial-and-error process begun in the 1980s and finalized in 2007, guided by the experts from the Confederación Hidrográfica del Júcar (CHJ). Our results show that the automated variable selection outcomes align with CHJ's 25-year-long empirical refinement. In addition, the resultant FRIDA index outperforms the official State Index in terms of accuracy in reproducing the target variable and cardinality of the selected inputs set.

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Is physical water scarcity a new phenomenon? Global assessment of water shortage over the last two millennia

Cited by 377 publications

References 37 publications

The relative importance of climate change and population growth for exposure to future extreme droughts

The relative importance of climate change and population growth for exposure to future extreme droughts

Crise de abastecimento de água em São Paulo e falta de planejamento estratégico

Automatic design of basin-specific drought indexes for highly regulated water systems

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