Estimating Gridded Domestic Water Demand and Assessing its Vulnerability over South-East Asian Countries

During the past three decades, the over-growing population of the south-east Asian countries is becoming a threat to the available potential water sources. This region also includes many developed as well as developing countries including Korea, China, Japan and India, and the higher rate of GDP growth also enhanced the living standard of people. As a result, the water scarcity has been increasing in various mega-cities of the region. Here, we present the assessment of grid-scale domestic water demand of each country by evaluating the gridded Domestic Structural Water Intensity (DSWI) over a period of 1995-2015 at a spatial resolution of 0.5°. We estimated yearly grid-scale DSWI with using the past economic development based on GDP and the population. Considering the gridded water demand, we assessed the vulnerability of major river basins of the region and the few cities having more than one million population. A few mega-cities in India located in arid and semi-arid regions of the river basins are already experiencing water stress. Developing such gridded dataset will give a better shape to project the future water demand by integrating the datasets within a water demand module of any land surface models.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a grant from the National Research Foundation of Korea funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning (2020R1A2C2007670).