Future global urban water scarcity and potential solutions

Chunyang He, Zhifeng Liu (), Jianguo Wu, Xinhao Pan, Zihang Fang, Jingwei Li and Brett A. Bryan
Additional contact information
Chunyang He: Beijing Normal University
Zhifeng Liu: Beijing Normal University
Jianguo Wu: Beijing Normal University
Xinhao Pan: Beijing Normal University
Zihang Fang: Beijing Normal University
Jingwei Li: Shanghai Normal University
Brett A. Bryan: Deakin University

Nature Communications, 2021, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-11

Abstract: Abstract Urbanization and climate change are together exacerbating water scarcity—where water demand exceeds availability—for the world’s cities. We quantify global urban water scarcity in 2016 and 2050 under four socioeconomic and climate change scenarios, and explored potential solutions. Here we show the global urban population facing water scarcity is projected to increase from 933 million (one third of global urban population) in 2016 to 1.693–2.373 billion people (one third to nearly half of global urban population) in 2050, with India projected to be most severely affected in terms of growth in water-scarce urban population (increase of 153–422 million people). The number of large cities exposed to water scarcity is projected to increase from 193 to 193–284, including 10–20 megacities. More than two thirds of water-scarce cities can relieve water scarcity by infrastructure investment, but the potentially significant environmental trade-offs associated with large-scale water scarcity solutions must be guarded against.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (37)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-25026-3 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:12:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-021-25026-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-25026-3

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().