Water depletion (Aqueduct 4.0)

Category: Transition risks · Overexploitation Coverage: Global Format: Boundary polygons (hydrological catchments) Used in risk analysis: No (contextual layer; not used in materiality scoring)

What it shows

This layer measures baseline water depletion: how much of an area's renewable water is permanently consumed — that is, withdrawn and not returned — relative to what is available. Where depletion is high, water is being drawn down faster than it is replenished, reducing what remains for downstream users and for nature.

How it is built

Baseline water depletion is the ratio of total water consumption to available renewable supplies in each catchment. Consumption combines domestic, industrial, irrigation and livestock consumptive uses — only the water that is actually used up, not water that is withdrawn and returned. Available supply accounts for how upstream consumption and large dams reduce water reaching downstream areas. It is closely related to baseline water stress, but uses consumptive withdrawal only rather than total demand. Values come from WRI Aqueduct 4.0 and are provided for hydrological catchment areas worldwide.

How to read it

Higher values indicate a larger net drawdown of the local water supply and reduced availability for downstream users; lower values indicate that consumption is small relative to renewable supply. A site is assessed by the depletion level of the basin it sits in.

Source

WRI Aqueduct 4.0 baseline water depletion (World Resources Institute). See doi.org/10.46830/writn.23.00061.

Comparison with the WWF Risk Filter Suite

This layer maps to BRF S1_1 Water Availability and WRF B1_1 Water Depletion, and belongs to the same family as WWF's depletion input. The alignment is direct.

Legend

Symbolised field: Baseline water depletion category

Generated from darwin/layers/layer-water-depletion-aqueduct-4-0.toml and risk_indicator_pairs.toml (develop).