Harvest Partners of the FEWS NET Team Publish Paper on Acute Water-Scarcity Monitoring for Africa

Our partners Amy McNally and Jim Verdin, along with the Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWS NET) team (including Laura Harrison and Shraddhanand Shukla, Harvest partners at UCSB CHC), as well as Kristine Verdin, Augusto Getirana, Jossy Jacob, Kristi Arsenault, and Christa Peters-Lidard, published their work on Acute Water-Scarcity Monitoring for Africa in MDPI Water’s Special Issue: “Water Supply and Water Scarcity” on September 18, 2019. The publication addresses the impacts of acute and chronic water scarcity, which currently affects around 4 billion people and will have even more adverse effects as the population continues to grow, inevitably increasing demand from food and energy production.

Population is increasing (a) and water is becoming more scarce (b).

While there is a large amount of existing data on chronic water insecurity trends at global and regional levels, there has been a lack of implementation of satisfactory systems that regularly monitor acute water scarcity. With the support of Harvest, the FEWS NET team is addressing this gap by developing their monthly monitoring system which computes annual water availability per capita. This monitoring system is based on hydrologic data supplied by the FEWS NET Land Data Assimilation System (FLDAS) and WorldPop’s gridded population data. The system provides yield maps of acute water scarcity which are meant to serve monitoring objectives, with the underlying data publicly available to support further research regarding population effects on hydrologic change and water scarcity.

Read the full article for more details on their findings.