Demand for hydropower is increasing, yet the water footprints (WFs) of reservoirs and hydropower, and their contributions to water scarcity, are poorly understood. Here, we calculate reservoir WFs (freshwater that evaporates from reservoirs) and hydropower WFs (the WF of hydroelectricity) in China based on data from 875 representative reservoirs (209 with power plants). In 2010, the reservoir W...

A global water scarcity assessment for the 21st century was conducted under the latest socio-economic scenario for global change studies, namely Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs). SSPs depict five global situations with substantially different socio-economic conditions. In the accompanying paper, a water use scenario compatible with the SSPs was developed. This scenario considers not only qu...

This special issue is a collection of recent papers in the field of Water Footprint Assessment (WFA), an emerging area of research focused on the analysis of freshwater use, scarcity, and pollution in relation to consumption, production, and trade. As increasing freshwater scarcity forms a major risk to the global economy, sustainable management of water resources is a prerequisite to developme...

on-farm management practices with the aim of improving water use efficiency (wue) are among the practical ways of overcoming the water scarcity problem. this study aims to investigate ways of implementing agricultural water management in abarkouh region, yazd province, which mainly deals with problems such as water scarcity and salinity of soil and water resources. to this end, the resulting sc...

virtual water adds a new dimension to crop trades and provides a new way of thinking about water scarcity. a systematic analysis of virtual water flows requires integration of all critical drivers of virtual water flows under a single consistent framework. the aim of this study was to assess virtual water flows related to trades of grain crops (wheat, corn, rice, and coarse cereals) and their i...

fresh water scarcity has become a global problem which needs a serious attempt to find proper solutions for decreasing the pressure on the limited water resources. the exact estimation of crop virtual water would help with choosing crops with high crop and water productivity which lead to both food and water security. thus, in this research, maize virtual water was estimated using hydrus2d base...

the dominant traditional view to designing drainage systems explains drainage goals only in terms of crop yield increase and rhizosphere improvement while ignoring the environmental impacts of drainage projects. nowadays, this view has been changed into a new one in which both environmental and agricultural purposes are taken into consideration. depth and spacing of subsoil drains are important...