The unequal water footprint of refugee displacement
Abstract
About 20 million refugees and asylum seekers currently live outside of their home country due to armed conflicts. We leverage new global data on the water footprint of food production to evaluate the corresponding displacement of food demand to host countries and the ensuing global redistribution of water stress. We find that the blue water demand displaced by global refugee migration has more than doubled between 2005 and 2016 to reach approximately 2.5 billion cubic meters per year, as conflicts are increasingly concentrated in arid regions with high reliance on irrigated agriculture. Refugees tend to migrate to neighboring countries where food has a lower blue water footprint than their home country, but where water is similarly scarce. Although the water demand of refugees is generally insufficient to substantially affect water stress conditions in host countries, Jordan, Yemen and Lebanon stand out as significant exceptions. There, we associate refugee migration in the 2005-2016 period to increases in water stress of 12, 3 and 6 percentage points, to be added to an already high baseline ratio of water consumption against water availability (1.02, 1.68 and 0.59 respectively). In Jordan, the documented increase in transboundary river inflow due to abandoned irrigated agriculture in upstream Syria is completely compensated by the food water demand of the corresponding refugees. The international community has a role to play in alleviating the water burden of refugee displacement, which is currently disproportionately carried by a few countries with already scarce water resources. This study facilitates the inclusion of water stress as one of many criteria to consider when planning refugee resettlement.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2021
- Bibcode:
- 2021AGUFMSY54A..03B