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A new tool projecting global water scenarios through 2100

Today, the National Geographic Society, through its World Freshwater Initiative, launched in collaboration with Utrecht University and Esri. World Water Map: Insights is an enhanced version of the World Water Map, providing expanded datasets and improved visualization tools for policymakers, water sector professionals and data storytellers who want a deeper analysis of what’s driving water scarcity and where and why it’s occurring. The expanded capabilities of World Water Map: Insights will enable users to project water availability scenarios through 2100, generate country, watershed and water province-level statistics, and guide conservation and policy decisions based on the data.

World Water Map: Insights also provides a quick view of the historical, current and future state of water availability — from the global to the hyper-local level. Expanding on the original World Water Map, it visualizes water availability based on three future scenarios, and also enables users to download data for every scale of geography.

Maps are the language of geography. World Water Map: Insights is a natural extension of the World Water Map — and the National Geographic Society’s legacy of championing geo-literacy. It lets us see into the future of global freshwater, all the way down to the local watershed. Preserving this precious resource, which is vital to all life on Earth, will be one of the defining challenges of the current century.

Additional features and enhancements of World Water Map: Insights include:

• Four levels of data on water availability and water use: View and download data on water withdrawal, water balance (the distribution of precipitation in evaporation, runoff and storage change), the “water gap” between supply and demand, and water demand by three sectors (domestic, industry and agriculture).
• Compare Mode: 2020 to 2050: Compare water availability by year and attribute (water withdrawal, balance, gap and demand) for a specific geography (country, water province or watershed). Users can also see what’s driving changes in water availability and identify trends.
• Create reports and access all the data: The tool is platform-agnostic, allowing users to create and download reports and images, and export formats like Geographic Tagged Image File Format (GeoTIFF), Portable Network Graphics (PNG) and Comma-Separated Values (CSV).

Mapping water availability, water demand and water shortage is critical for informing decisions to help mitigate water-related climate issues, protect nature and even scale up innovations for more efficient water use. We hope World Water Map: Insights is an informative tool, whether you’re a policymaker who wants to understand water gaps and plan for future needs, a data storyteller who wants to document water issues with even more nuance, or a curious learner who wants to inspire their community to have a more sustainable relationship with water.

World Water Map: Insights is free, open-source and runs on desktop and mobile platforms. The underlying data will be updated annually.

The original World Water Map, launched in 2023, will remain available as a tool to promote learning about water science with an emphasis on compelling stories by National Geographic Explorers, who are covering water issues and stories of hope in communities worldwide. These Explorers include Caitlin Ochs, who is how the Colorado River’s water shortage crisis is impacting farming communities, and Aika Kirei, who produced and distributed a highlighting Dar es Salaam's shrinking lakes.