U015-15
The social-ecological hotspots of changing global freshwater availability

Friday, 11 December 2020: 18:17
Xander Huggins1, Tom Gleeson1, Matti Kummu2, Samuel C Zipper3, Tara J. Troy4, Yoshihide Wada5 and James S Famiglietti6, (1)University of Victoria, Department of Civil Engineering, Victoria, BC, Canada, (2)Aalto University, Water and Development Research Group, Aalto, Finland, (3)University of Wisconsin Madison, Madison, WI, United States, (4)Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, United States, (5)International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria, (6)Global Institute for Water Security, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada
Abstract:
Human activity, climate change, and natural variability all contribute to driving changes in water availability around the world. As the role of humans in the global hydrological cycle is increasingly quantified and understood, it may be wise to consider global hydrological change in a social-ecological system framework. Social-ecological systems are interconnected and interdependent human and natural systems, and offer an important lens of analysis for common-pool resource decision-making at all scales. While incorporating human activity, climate change and variability into global hydrological models has long been prioritized to understand the socioeconomic and ecological impacts of hydrologic change, an explicit social-ecological systems approach has yet to be applied to global hydrological assessments.

We use annual trends in freshwater storage observed by the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment as our hydrological basis and combine with 10 other global social-ecological datasets to 1) define a new, more inclusive characterization of global hotspots of trends in freshwater availability based on social-ecological and hydrological parameters, and 2) identify the primary drivers of water availability trends that underlie the hotspots.

We quantify for the first time that human intervention is the dominant force shaping changes in freshwater availability in global social-ecological systems. Overall, we find drying trends to dominate the hotspots (71% by area), which are found throughout the Americas, Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Asia, although the Northern Great Plains, the Okavango Delta, and the Sahel are notable wetting exceptions.

These hotspot regions encompass 993 million people (89% in drying areas), 1.11 x1015 crop calories (81% in drying areas), and 12% of global GDP (90% in drying areas). Further, the emerging trends in freshwater availability in these social-ecological hotspots are exacerbating current water risks: 48% of wetting hotspots have moderate or greater flooding risk while 76% of drying hotspots have moderate or greater drought risk.

This process also yields a transferrable template to similarly distill critical social-ecological regions of trends in other common-pool natural resources at the global scale.

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