Data from: The planet's stressed river basins: too much pressure or too little adaptive capacity?

Freshwater is one of the most critical elements for sustainable
development of ecosystems and societies. River basins, concomitant with
administrative zones, form a common unit for freshwater management. So
far, no comprehensive, global analysis exists that would link the
ecological challenges of the planet's river basins to the capacity of
the societies to cope with them. We address this gap by performing a
geospatial resilience analysis for a global set of 541 river basins. We
use the social‐ecological systems (SES) approach by relating three
ecological vulnerability factors (human footprint, natural hazards, water
scarcity) with three adaptive capacity factors (governance, economy, human
development), based on temporal trajectories from 1990 to 2015.
Additionally, we examine resilience by subtracting ecological
vulnerability from adaptive capacity. The most striking result is the
fundamentally different patterns of controlling factors of the resilience
in different developing regions, particularly those of Africa and Asia.
Their root causes are particularly low adaptive capacity in Africa, and
high ecological vulnerability in Asia. Alarmingly, the difference between
those continents grew within the study period. Finally, this study
highlights the rapid dynamics of adaptive capacity in comparison to
ecological vulnerability, the latter having more inertia. Their fragile
balance is of our interest; they can either support or counteract each
other depending on the geographic location.