Capping Human Water Footprints in the World's River Basins.

ABSTRACT: 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 seas

SUBMITTER: Hogeboom RJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7375134 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature