Water Crisis Risk and the EU - A Quantitative Analysis of Global Water Crisis Risk and an Assessment of its Implications for EU Water Management Policy

Sammanfattning: Water is arguably the world’s most valuable endangered resource, the management of which has been subject of contentious debate that in recent years has gained growing political, economic and media attention. This study intends to make use of that momentum by constructing a framework for quantifying global water crisis risk that is applied to assess both the EU’s share of such risk and the success of EU water management policy in reducing it. Subsequently, high-risk areas in the EU are identified and policy suggestions for reducing their water crisis risk are provided. Finally, the insights from the previous steps are considered to discuss and provide a central reformulation of EU water management policy. The research design employs a statistical analysis to (1) quantify global water crisis risk, (2) assess the overlap between EU water crisis risk and EU water management policy implementation and (3) identify high-risk EU areas. The results indicate that: the EU holds a large share of global water crisis risk, there is considerable overlap between EU water crisis risk and EU water management policy implementation, and the high-risk EU areas face systematically different water crisis risk scenarios contingent upon their geographic location.