Water scarcity is often understood as a problem for regions experiencing drought, but a new study from Cornell and Tufts universities finds that not only can localized water shortages impact the global economy, but changes in global demand send positive and negative ripple effects to water basins across the globe.
Water scarcity is often understood as a problem for regions experiencing drought, but a new study from Cornell and Tufts universities finds that not only can localized water shortages impact the global economy, but changes in global demand send positive and negative ripple effects to water basins across the globe.
“We are looking at water scarcity as a globally connected and multi-sector phenomenon,” said Jonathan Lamontagne, M.S. '14, Ph.D. '15, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Tufts University, who co-authored the study with Patrick Reed, the Joseph C. Ford Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell. Tufts graduate student Flannery Dolan is lead author of the study, which suggests water scarcity dynamics are more complicated than traditionally acknowledged.
The study, “Evaluating the economic impact of water scarcity in a changing world,” was published March 26 in Nature Communications, and uniquely captures the interdependent effects of global trade consistently with differences in regional climate policies as well as river basin-specific capacity to address water scarcity risks.
The researchers coupled physical and economic models to simulate thousands of potential climate futures for 235 major river basins – a technique known as scenario discovery – to better understand how water scarcity is a globally-connected phenomenon, with local conditions having reverberations across the globe in industries such as agriculture, energy, transportation and manufacturing.
Read more at Cornell University
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