Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas (2013)

Detailed Description

World Resource Institute’s (WRI) Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas is a publicly-available online global database of local-level water risk indicators and a global standard for measuring and reporting geographic water risk. Aqueduct’s global water risk mapping tool helps companies, investors, governments, and other users understand where and how water risks and opportunities are emerging worldwide.

Aqueduct uses a robust, peer reviewed methodology and the best-available data to create high-resolution, customizable global maps of water risk. Its water risk assessment looks not only at water supply issues, but also those related to water quality, potential regulatory pressure, governance, climate change impacts, and socio-economic dynamics, while tracking the distribution of population, industry, and irrigated agriculture.

Aqueduct consists of three primary components:

• The Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas: The Water Risk Atlas includes the majority of the tool’s water indicators and mapping functions to evaluate current and future exposure to water risks.
• The Aqueduct country and river basin rankings: measures of country and river basin average exposure to five of Aqueduct’s water risk indicators: baseline water stress, inter-annual variability, seasonal variability, flood occurrence, and drought severity. Risk exposure scores are available for every country, the 100 most populous river basins, and the 100 largest river basins by area. Scores are also available for all industrial, agricultural, and domestic users’ average exposure to each indicator in each country and river basin.
• The Aqueduct maps of agricultural exposure to water stress: measures of competition for and depletion of water in major agricultural areas worldwide, organized by major commodity crop and crop group.

Aqueduct in action