World water resources and regional vulnerability: Impact of future changes

This report is the first presentation of results from the Water Resources Project’s current focus on climate change, water resources, and socioeconomic impacts. Not only is the global assessment valuable in itself, but the regional analysis has identified areas of acute vulnerability which require further in-depth study. Future efforts should focus on reducing the spatial (river basins) and temporal (crucial periods within the hydrological year) scales of the analyses, as well as on addressing water-quality issues and socioeconomic/water resource feedback mechanisms. This study should be of value to water resources analysts and economic development policy makers as well as scholars and researchers in the field. It clearly shows that water vulnerability will be one of the most urgent problems of the coming decades and must be explicitly considered in any analysis of global change or sustainable development.