Drought Curtailment Order
This layer shows which water use is cut first when water runs short.
Source: Darwin, from VigiEau, drought plans, water rights and water law Year: 2012-2026 Category: Physical risks · Provisioning services · Water availability Coverage: Global Format: Boundary polygons (French departments, sub-national units, countries) Used in risk analysis: No (display only; no Darwin figure reads this layer)
What it shows
This layer shows which water use is cut first when water runs short: farms, industry, households or other uses. Some areas have no single use cut first, rank uses by the seniority of water rights, protect drinking water only, have no ranking in law, or ban no use. A site in an area where industry is cut first is the most exposed to a drought restriction order.
How it is built
Each area shows the most precise reading found, in this order:
- France: the drought restriction orders applied in each department from 2012 to 2025 (VigiEau).
- A sub-national unit: the Spanish basin drought plans, the seniority of water rights in California and Colorado, and the allocation history of the Murray-Darling Basin.
- A country: the observed practice, or else the legal order of its water law.
The popup names the reading used and quotes its evidence. In France it also gives the number of years with a ban on industry, for a plant with its own abstraction and for a plant on the drinking-water network.
How to read it
The colour names the use cut first. Read the popup before you conclude: a French department reads what its orders did, while a country reads its law, which says less about what happens in a given drought.
Keep three limits in mind. The extraction of the orders matches VigiEau within one severity step in 72 % of cases. 22 % of the quotes were not found in their source. 137 national legal orders are not checked by a human.
Source
Darwin, from VigiEau (Licence Ouverte 2.0), Spanish basin drought plans, US state water-right records, MDBA allocations and national water laws. Boundaries: IGN ADMIN EXPRESS, EEA WISE WFD River Basin Districts, USGS WBD, CDSS, MDBA, Made with Natural Earth.
Legend
Symbolised field: Cut first in a drought
| Value | Label | Colour |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | No data | #d3d3d3 |
| 1 | Farms cut first | #e6a532 |
| 2 | Industry cut first | #c0392b |
| 3 | Households cut first | #8e44ad |
| 4 | Other uses cut first | #7f8c8d |
| 5 | No single use cut first | #f5d7a1 |
| 6 | Seniority of rights decides | #2e86c1 |
| 7 | Drinking water first, other uses not ranked | #a9cce3 |
| 8 | No ranking in law | #eaf2f8 |
| 9 | No use banned | #d5f5e3 |
Generated from darwin/layers/layer-drought-curtailment-order.toml (develop).