Journal
EARTHS FUTURE
Volume 8, Issue 2, Pages -Publisher
AMER GEOPHYSICAL UNION
DOI: 10.1029/2019EF001363
Keywords
water footprint caps; water availability; planetary boundaries; environmental flow requirements; water scarcity; Global Hydrology Models
Funding
- NWO Earth and Life Sciences (ALW) [869.15.007]
- European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Earth@lternatives project) [834716]
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Increased water demand and overexploitation of limited freshwater resources lead to water scarcity, economic downturn, and conflicts over water in many places around the world. A sensible policy measure to bridle humanity's water footprint, then, is to set local and time-specific water footprint caps, to ensure that water appropriation for human uses remains within ecological boundaries. This study estimates-for all river basins in the world-monthly blue water flows that can be allocated to human uses, while explicitly earmarking water for nature. Addressing some implications of temporal variability, we quantify trade-offs between potentially violating environmental flow requirements versus underutilizing available flow-a trade-off that is particularly pronounced in basins with a high seasonal and interannual variability. We discuss several limitations and challenges that need to be overcome if setting water footprint caps is to become a practically applicable policy instrument, including the need (for policy makers) to reach agreement on which specific capping procedure to follow. We conclude by relating local and time-specific water footprint caps to the planetary boundary for freshwater use.
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