Abstract
Water footprint assessments contribute to a better understanding of potential environmental impacts related to water and have become essential in water management. The methodologies for characterizing such assessments, however, usually fail to reflect temporal and spatial variations at local scales. In this paper, we employ four widely-used characterization factors, which were originally developed with global estimates of water demand and availability, to evaluate the impact that inter-basin transfer (IBT) of water has on water risk assessments and, consequently, on the evaluation of the soundness of water cycle. The study was conducted for two major river basins in Japan, where diversion channels were built to move water from the Tone river basin to the Arakawa river basin. Considering IBT, the available water in the Arakawa river basin increases a 45%, reducing the characterization factors a 44% on average and denoting their tendency to overestimate the risk in this basin, while the Tone river basin increased the characterization factors a 28% on average by IBT. Moreover, with a simple example we show how ambiguity in the definition of some characterization factors may cause significant changes in the result of the assessments. Finally, we concluded that local water footprint characterization can be more helpful in local assessment of water resources if the results are unanimous, Targetable, Replicable, Ameliorable, Comparable, and Engageable (uTRACE).
Highlights
Water resources are of vital importance for the health and livelihood of humans as well as the surrounding natural environments
We report the results of recalculating the four abovementioned characterization factors (i.e., Baseline Water Stress (BWS), Water Stress Index (WSI), fwua and CFAWARE ) using local data and adapting the formulations of water demand-to-availability to reflect the effect of the inter-basin transfer (IBT) between the Tone and Arakawa river basins
Due to approximations and assumptions about small-scale variability of water supply and demand, global estimates of characterization factors fail to represent the actual local conditions that might have been changed to improve the soundness of water cycles
Summary
Water resources are of vital importance for the health and livelihood of humans as well as the surrounding natural environments. The sixth goal of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) acknowledges water as an essential part of the livelihood of the world’s population, emphasizing on two requisites for accomplishing a healthy, environmentally sustainable and economically prosper quality of life. These requisites are (1) access to safe water and sanitation and (2) sound management. The targets included in this goal encompass access to safe and affordable drinking water, water quality improvement, water-use efficiency, protection of water-related ecosystems, and capacity-building support to developing countries. Because water stress can be defined in different mathematical ways and include other variables (e.g., space, time, and source), the evaluation and inter-regional comparison is not simple and has led to the development of alternative ways to measure water stress and the associated environmental risks
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