Development of Arab Water Sustainability Index Using Principal Component Analysis

The growing interest in the use of indices is closely connected to the increasing complexity of policy problems and the amount of available data. In the water sector, beyond their face value, indices can provide various types of information: description, communication, assessment, showing trends and predicting the future. Because the Arab world is the most water-scarce part of the world, most of the region’s countries put additional priority on water storage, balancing competing claims for allocation, promoting more efficient water use and self-sufficiency. In order to address water sustainability, and its relationship to human and ecological needs, this study aims to develop an index for the water sustainability in the Arab region. The proposed Arab Water Sustainability Index (AWSI) is a conceptual framework incorporating a variety of physical, socio-economic and environmental elements of water status in the Arab region. A multivariate model, based on the principal component analysis, is designed to provide information on the most meaningful parameters, which describe whole data set affording data reduction with minimum loss of original information. Four theme-based components have been proposed for the AWSI to reflect a useful and meaningful breakdown: water crowding, dependency, scarcity and environmental sustainability. The index is developed as a policy tool to measure a sustainability state relative to a base condition or period, which allows for comparison between regions and for comparison over time.