Nearly one-fifth of the world’s population lives in a stressed water basin where the next climate change-driven incident could threaten access to an essential resource for agriculture, industry and life itself, according to a paper by University of California, Irvine researchers and others, published today in Nature Sustainability.
Nearly one-fifth of the world’s population lives in a stressed water basin where the next climate change-driven incident could threaten access to an essential resource for agriculture, industry and life itself, according to a paper by University of California, Irvine researchers and others, published today in Nature Sustainability.
The study’s authors analyzed trends in global water usage from 1980 to 2016, with a particular focus on so-called inflexible consumption, the curtailment of which would cause significant financial and societal hardship. Those uses include irrigating perennial crops, cooling thermal power plants, storing water in reservoirs, and quenching the thirst of livestock and humans.
“Many studies evaluating water scarcity have mainly centered on the share of the available supply being consumed by humans, but this ignores the fact that some uses are more flexible or productive than others,” said lead author Yue Qin, a UCI postdoctoral scholar in Earth system science. “By looking at how water is actually used, we can begin to see what water is really difficult to do without and if there are any opportunities for savings in other areas.”
Read more at University of California Irvine
Image: During a prolonged drought, annual crop fields can be left fallow without causing lasting economic damage, but almond groves, such as these in California’s Central Valley, require consistent irrigation to stay alive. UCI researchers paid special attention to such flexible and inflexible water uses in a new study published in Nature Sustainability. CREDIT: Steven Davis / UCI
