Area affected during at least for one quarter of the year by water scarcity conditions in the EU, measured by the water exploitation index plus

The graph presents trend with the area of the European Union affected by water scarcity conditions between 2000-2019. Water scarcity conditions is adopted, i.e. when WEI+ values are above 20% for at least a quarter of the year in a given river sub basin; annual quarters are: Q1 (January-March), Q2 (April-June), Q3 (July-September), Q4 (October-December). No sufficient data available from Italy, hence Italian river basins have not been included in the analysis.

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Methodology

• Any river sub-basin delineated in Ecrins with quarterly WEI+ value equal or greater than 20% is adopted as area where water scarcity was experienced.
• WEI+ illustrates the percentage of water consumption against renewable freshwater resources available for a given territory and period.
• Slovakia provided its annual WEI for 2019 by excluding the impacts of the Danube river on the overall water balance of the country.
• ISPRA, in collaboration with Istat, provided provisional annual WEI+ values for Italy for the years 2015-2019 by following the WEI+ formula that is also implemented by the EEA. In the annual WEI+ computation for Italy (2015-2019), the term ΔS (change in water storage) is negligible and it has therefore been set equal to zero. In the seasonal WEI+ estimation, provided by Italy for 2019, the term ΔS (change in water storage) has been considered instead.

Units

Percentage

Additional information

This chart gives an overview of the total area affected by water scarcity conditions in the European Union.

Area affected during at least for one quarter of the year by water scarcity conditions in the EU, measured by the water exploitation index plus

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References and footnotes