SSP-aligned projected European water withdrawal/consumption at 5 arcminutes

Release 0.9.1 – What is new?

·         Industrial water withdrawals were initially overestimated due to a problem with the input data, but they are now fixed.

·         Historical water withdrawal covering 1960-2020 added. Consistency between historical and projected water withdrawals is maintained.

Contents and naming conventions

Annual European water withdrawal:

{scenario}_{sector} _year_millionm3_5min_Europe_{from_year}_{to_year}.nc

Scenarios: historical, ssp1, ssp2, ssp3, ssp5

Sector: dom, ind; stand for domestic/industrial

                From/to_year: 1960/2020, 2020/2100; historical/ssp projections.

Each file holds two variables: {sector}ww and {sector}wc representing gross and net (i.e. consumptive use) water withdrawal. For exmaple, for the industrial sector, there are two variables: indww and indwc. The fraction ‘1 – indwc/indww ‘ represents the share of return flows.

-------------------------

The dataset provides annual water withdrawal and consumption estimates for Europe at a spatial resolution of 5 arcminutes, covering the periods 1960-2020 (historical) and 2020-2100 for four SSPs (1, 2, 3, and 5). Below, we outline the procedure used to downscale the population projections to a 5-arcminute resolution and describe the main equations applied to project water withdrawal and consumption under different SSPs.

The development of the high-resolution (5 arcminute) projected water withdrawal and consumption for Europe follows the methodology outlined by Wada et al. (2011a, 2011b). This new release incorporates new projections for population, GDP per capita, and urbanization patterns from the latest SSP database (v3.0.1; available at https://data.ece.iiasa.ac.at/ssp/). Since this update is still in progress as of August 25th, 2024, some necessary input data are sourced from an earlier version of the SSP data (SSP 2013, see Table 1).  All data and methods used to generate the results provided in this dataset are described in the Readme - Data and Methods file.

Table 1: Data availability in different versions of the SSP database as of August 25th 2024.

Data

SSP DatabaseVersion

Module

Population

SSP v3.0.1 2024

Domestic

GDP per capita

SSP v3.0.1 2024

Domestic/industrial

Energy use per capita

SSP 2013

Industrial

Electricity use per capita

SSP 2013

Industrial