Schewe J, Heinke J, Gerten D, Haddeland I, Arnell NW, Clark DB, Dankers R, Eisner S, Fekete BM, Colón-González FJ, et al. March 2014. “Multimodel Assessment of Water Scarcity under Climate Change.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 111, no. 9 (2014): 3245-3250. (Schewe J, et al. 2014) http://www.jstor.org/stable/23770677.

Water scarcity can be defined as the universally-understood struggle to overcome barriers to accessing clean, potable water for the purposes of sustaining life. Many factors can influence water scarcity, but the question narrows our focus down to the issue of climate change and its correlation to increasing levels of water scarcity. The relationship between climate change and water is well-established, but the magnitude in which climate change exacerbates water scarcity continues to be muddled by inconsistent findings and reports among the scientific community. Even though climate change models agree on the global average change, they do not focus on individual communities and their changes at smaller scales. Thus, comparing spatial models of different global communities and their levels of water scarcity to measures of population increase, global mean warming, and estimates of people living in places facing a change in water resources will reveal the underlying details of the correlation between climate change and water scarcity. This study reveals some very key issues about the preexisting way to measure global water scarcity; if one country happened to overcome water scarcity issues on a large-scale, and a much smaller location started facing very threatening water scarcity issues, the net measurement of global water scarcity would remain at zero change. Therefore, the way that water scarcity was measured would conceal some serious issues in smaller regions. Overall, the uncertainty found in global hydrological models (GHM) contributed to the spread of water scarcity and unchecked issues in more specific locations. The examination of these GHMs shed light on how to streamline the analysis of them in order to improve projections for water scarcity in the future.