That’s the finding of international research that included the work of MSU water expert Yadu Pokhrel and made public today in the journal Nature Communications.
“This study used five global hydrological models to examine the movement of water scarcity.
One was a model that I developed,” said Pokhrel, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering and participating member in the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project.
“Mine is one of the five modeling groups that provided the data presented in the paper.” Pokhrel said the overuse of groundwater is an unseen drought.
“The extremes are getting worse,” he said.
“With seven billion plus of us on the planet, we’ve got to start rethinking how we use fresh water."
That sentiment was confirmed by international researchers who assessed human intervention on water scarcity at a global scale.
But it’s not so straightforward,” said Ted Veldkamp, researcher at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and guest researcher at IIASA, who led the study.
Seasonal changes in precipitation and water storage make it difficult for modelers to estimate water availability and impacts of interventions, and the effects of climate change can be difficult to tease out from other impacts like human activities.
They also highlighted the separate impact of climate change and human interventions.