Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
New global models provide the opportunity to generate quantitative information about the world water situation.Here the WaterGAP 2 model is used to compute globally comprehensive estimates about water availability, water withdrawals, and other indicators on the river-basin scale.In applying the model to the current global water situation, it was found that about 24% of world river basin area has a withdrawal to availability ratio greater than 0.4, which some experts consider to be a rough indication of "severe water stress"; the impacts of this stress are expected to be stronger in developing countries than in industrialized ones.Under a "businessas-usual" scenario of continuing demographic, economic and technological trends up to 2025, water withdrawals are expected to stabilize or decrease in 41% of world river basin areas because of the saturation of water needs and improvement in water-use efficiency.Withdrawals grow elsewhere because population and economic growth will lead to rising demand for water, and this outweighs the assumed improvements in water-use efficiency.An uncertainty analysis showed that the uncertainty of these estimates is likely to have a strong geographic variability.
Alcamo et al. (Sun,) studied this question.