Image: thaibiodiversity.org
Playing with maps can be fun — except when it’s totally depressing.
In adding China Water Risk, an interesting information source, to this blog’s Water Resources page, I was reminded of another one I had already added: World Resources Institute (WRI), which provides a home for Aqueduct’s mapping surveys of water-stressed places. China Water Risk provides a version of WRI’s helpful breakdown of the data and list of 36 most water-stressed countries. So, rather than jumping straight into the mapping tool’s various menus to generate visualizations of data, you can get a bit of an overview of how the tool works and some of its findings.
Aqueduct’s mapping tool, the Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas, uses 12 indicators to value amounts of water stress, and assigns each country a score of up to 5 points, the high end of the scale for potential water stress. Sixteen countries representing a handful of world regions, such as the Caribbean, the Middle East, and parts of Africa and Asia, achieve a perfect(ly dire) score of 5.0. All 36 countries on the list of the most at risk of water stress rank 4.01 or higher, suffering “extremely high risk.” See the list.
At the Waterline 