Ensuring good quality water in sufficient quantities for all legitimate uses is a major policy aim of the European Commission, and the main aim of the Blueprint to Safeguard Europe's Water, which will be launched in 2012. The Blueprint is the EU policy response to emerging challenges in the field of water.
It is within this policy framework that JRC carries out research on hydrological simulation modelling, aiming to provide scientific assessments of general available water resources and floods, droughts and water scarcity. The main aim of the work is to assess current and future water availability versus current and future water demands from different economic sectors.
Before future challenges can be addressed, a thorough analysis of current water resources is needed. The scope of this study is an analysis of current water resources in Europe and Africa, and matching water supply and water demand from various sectors.
Several attempts already have been made to assess European, African and global water resources. Recently, Haddeland et al. (2011) produced a multimodel estimate of the global terrestrial water balance at 0.5o spatial resolution. This has been achieved within the Global Water Availability Assessment (GWAVA), developed in the context of the EU-funded WATCH project (https://gateway.ceh.ac.uk ).
Within another EU-funded project GLOWASIS (Global Water Scarcity Information System), Utrecht University and Deltares develop a global water scarcity map also at 0.5o spatial resolution, to be finished Dec 2012 (http://glowasis.eu ). First results are published in Van Beek et al (2011). JRC is partner in this project to benchmark the global product with the higher resolution European and African assessments.
A further study was conducted by Hoekstra and Mekonnen (2011), assessing global water scarcity for the world’s major river basins.
Other available information on global water resources are available from:
• FAO, Aquastat portal http://www.fao.org/nr/water/aquastat/globalmaps/index.stm
• UNEP: http://maps.grida.no/go/graphic/freshwater-availability-groundwater-and-river-flow
• Cleaningwater: http://cleaningwater.se/whats-new/geographical-distribution
• IWMI Institute: http://www.iwmi.cgiar.org/WAtlas/Default.aspx
• World Resources Institute: http://earthtrends.wri.org/maps_spatial/maps_detail_static.php?map_select=265&theme=4
• Monde diplomatique: http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/cartes/disponibiliteeau
• GRID-Arendal (Africa): http://www.grida.no/publications/vg/africa/
• EEA (Europe): http://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/figures/annual-water-availability-per-capita-by-country-2001
In general however, the analysis done in the products described above is done at national scales, at relatively coarse spatial resolution (0.5o), and using water demand data from the year 2000 or before, because more recent data are not yet available. The scope of the study presented here, is to carry out an higher spatial resolution analysis for Europe (5 km ~ 0.05o) and Africa (0.1o), using a daily timescale for modelling, and using for Europe new JRC analysis of water uses for irrigation, livestock, industry and energy, and domestic purposes. The analysis is carried out using the JRC LISFLOOD hydrological simulation model, supported by several other available models (EPIC, LUMP).
DE ROO Arie;
BOURAOUI Faycal;
BUREK Peter Andreas;
BISSELINK Bernard;
VANDECASTEELE Ine;
MUBAREKA Sarah;
SALAMON Peter;
PASTORI Marco;
ZAMBRANO Hector;
THIEMIG Vera;
BIANCHI Alessandra;
LAVALLE Carlo;
2012-03-13
Publications Office of the European Union
JRC69423
978-92-79-23340-1 (print),
978-92-79-23341-8,
1018-5593 (print),
1831-9424 (online),
EUR 25247 EN,
OP LB-NA-25247-EN-C (print),
OP LB-NA-25247-EN-N (online),
https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC69423,
10.2788/16108 (print),
10.2788/16165 (online),
