Are Reservoirs Water Consumers or Water Collectors? Reflections on the Water Footprint Concept Applied on Reservoirs

T. Bakken (), F. Kjosavik, Å. Killingtveit and K. Alfredsen

Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA), 2015, vol. 29, issue 14, 4919-4926

Abstract: IPCC Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources (2011) revealed potentially very high water consumption rates from hydropower production compared to other renewable technologies, but suffered from few studies and methodological problems. More recent studies present new estimates values far beyond those presented by IPCC, some claiming that hydropower is a large-scale water consumer, but do not provide a more consistent picture of the ‘true water consumption of hydropower’. We compiled data from ICOLD’s World Register of Dams, considered being the most extensive and complete global dataset of reservoirs and dams larger than 15 m containing description of close to 40 000 dams and reservoirs. We coupled this dataset with water scarcity information about the location of the individual projects and found that only very few reservoirs located in water-scarce areas are used exclusively for hydropower production or have that as their main purpose (fewer than 0.1 %). As the purpose of the majority of the reservoirs located in water-scarce areas are to collect water in the wet season to secure adequate supply of water for irrigation, domestic supply, industry and more purposes in the dry season, we find it fundamentally problematic to assign a water footprint to such an infrastructure, even though the purpose of these reservoirs might also be to produce electricity. Rather opposite - the fact that reservoirs increase the availability of water in the dry season make reservoirs needed. We conclude that assigning water footprint/consumption values of reservoirs will convey the wrong message to decision-makers unless the reservoirs’ effect on the availability of local water resources is fully accounted for. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Keywords: Water footprint; Reservoirs; Hydropower (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11269-015-1104-x (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:spr:waterr:v:29:y:2015:i:14:p:4919-4926

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11269

DOI: 10.1007/s11269-015-1104-x

Access Statistics for this article

Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA) is currently edited by G. Tsakiris

More articles in Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA) from Springer, European Water Resources Association (EWRA)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().