Water Stress 2050 (Aqueduct 4.0)

Category: Physical risks · Provisioning services · Water availability Coverage: Global Format: Boundary polygons (hydrological catchments) Used in risk analysis: No (contextual layer; not used in materiality scoring)

What it shows

This layer projects baseline water stress — the share of available renewable water already claimed by competing users — forward to around 2050. It helps anticipate where chronic water competition is likely to intensify over a longer horizon, supporting longer-term planning on water exposure.

How it is built

This is a forward-looking version of the Water Stress (Aqueduct 4.0) layer. It represents long-term, chronic water-stress trends centred on 2050 (covering roughly 2035–2065), reported as the median across five global climate models to reduce single-model uncertainty. As with the baseline layer, values are provided for hydrological catchment areas worldwide.

How to read it

Higher values indicate greater projected competition for water and therefore higher future water-supply risk; lower values indicate comparatively secure supply. As a longer-range projection it should be read as an indication of direction and relative pressure rather than an exact forecast.

Source

WRI Aqueduct 4.0 projected water risk, 2050 horizon (World Resources Institute).

Comparison with the WWF Risk Filter Suite

The WWF Risk Filter Suite publishes present-day indicators only. This is a forward-looking, future-dated version of the Water Stress indicator (BRF S1_1 / WRF B1_2) and has no distinct WWF equivalent; it should be understood as a temporal scenario variant of a risk WWF already covers for the present day.

Legend

Symbolised field: Water Stress 2050

Generated from darwin/layers/layer-water-stress-2050-aqueduct-4-0.toml and risk_indicator_pairs.toml (develop).