Environment layer
Water Stress by country
Compare freshwater withdrawal as a share of available renewable water resources.
Compare water stress across countries on an interactive world map. Open any country for the latest value, the comparable-sample rank, the source, and the method.
What this measures
Higher water stress (withdrawals take a larger share of available freshwater); lower water stress (withdrawals take a smaller share of available freshwater).
Unit: %. Water stress.
Methodology
Values are World Bank World Development Indicators ER.H2O.FWST.ZS: level of water stress, freshwater withdrawal as a proportion of available freshwater resources, from FAO AQUASTAT (SDG indicator 6.4.2). The indicator is total freshwater withdrawn by agriculture, industry, and services divided by total renewable freshwater resources after environmental flow requirements. Total renewable resources include internal runoff and transboundary inflows. Values can exceed 100 percent when withdrawals use non-renewable (fossil) groundwater, exceed annual replenishment, or include water reserved for environmental flows; desalinated water is not counted as freshwater withdrawal. OurBlueDot does not interpolate, fill missing years, or replace missing values with zero. Country rows are joined by ISO 3166-1 alpha-3; regional and income aggregates are excluded. Map ranks are comparable-sample competition ranks among currently loaded countries (rank 1 is the highest water stress). Missing countries remain without a value.
Coverage & source
- Source
- World Bank World Development Indicators
- License
- CC BY 4.0
- Period
- 2022
- Frequency
- Annual
- Data nature
- observed
Rankings, where shown, describe only countries with comparable values in the selected period.