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Paper Philip Ward and Hans de Moel awarded ‘Best Article Published in 2010’
Environmental Research Letters has announced the paper 'Is physical water scarcity a new phenomenon? Global assessment of water shortage over the last two millennia' as the winner of the best article published in 2010 award of Environmental Research Letters (ERL).
The paper was a collaboration between Aalto University Finland and the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM) of VU University Amsterdam. The main author, Dr. Matti Kummu (Aalto University Finland), is a regular guest at IVM, and wrote the paper together with IVM researchers Dr. Philip Ward and Hans de Moel, as well as Prof. Olli Varis (Aalto University).
The paper features in an exclusive fifth anniversary collection of ERL. The collection includes the winning articles of each year from 2006 to 2011. A printed version of the collection will be showcased at this year’s AGU meeting in San Francisco in December. The paper was selected by the ERL Editorial Board from a shortlist based on the following criteria: novelty; scientific impact; readership; broad appeal; and wider media coverage.
The paper investigates the spatiotemporal development of water shortage over the period 0 AD to 2005 AD. This was done using population data from the HYDE dataset, and water resource availability based on WaterGAP model results for 1961–90. Changes in historical water resources availability were simulated with the STREAM rainfall-runoff model, forced by climate model data from ECBilt–CLIO–VECODE. The results show that, although there were a few areas with moderate water shortage (1000–1700 m3/capita/yr) around the year 1800, water shortage began in earnest at around 1900, when 2% of the world population was under chronic water shortage (<1000 m3/capita/yr). By 1960, this had risen to 9%. From then on, the number of people under water shortage increased rapidly to the year 2005, by which time 35% of the world population lived in areas with chronic water shortage. In this study, the effects of changes in population on water shortage are roughly four times more important than changes in water availability as a result of long-term climatic change. Global trends in adaptation measures to cope with reduced water resources per capita, such as irrigated area, reservoir storage, groundwater abstraction, and global trade of agricultural products, closely follow the recent increase in global water shortage.
IVM and Aalto University are continuing their successful cooperation, and are currently working on projects related to water shortage and food waste.
Full citation: Kummu, M., Ward, P.J., De Moel, H., Varis, O., 2010. Is physical water scarcity a new phenomenon? Global assessment of water shortage over the last two millennia. Environmental Research Letters, 5(3), 034006, http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/5/3/034006.
