Water-Energy-Food-Ecosystems pathways towards reducing water scarcity in Europe

The LISFLOOD-EPIC European setup has now successfully run for the reference 1990-2018 scenario, for single and combined water saving measure scenarios. In this study, five water (policy) saving measures are considered, i.e., efficiency scenarios in irrigation, leakage in the urban water supply, re-using treated wastewater, reducing energy water withdrawals and desalination. This creates a big challenge when it comes to comparisons between the what-if and the reference scenarios because of the complexity of the issue and the lack of a single performance index that can show how much better or worse a scenario is, compared to another. The Water Exploitation Index Plus (WEI+) indicator is used to estimate the impact of water saving measures on water scarcity. It is calculated for the consumption of water and is defined as the ratio of the total water net consumption divided by the available freshwater resources in a region including upstream inflowing water. The differences in WEI+ between a reference scenario and the proposed measure or measures, is a clear indication of the improvement this measure is capable of achieving as a percentage of the total water availability. Therefore, in this report, the results focus on the differences in WEI+ values, rather than on absolute values. The results showed that the scenarios with combined measures are the most effective, and future work will focus to estimate if this improvement will be sufficient to tackle water scarcity issues if climate change is also taken into account.

JRC.D.2 - Ocean and Water