New paper: Imported virtual water is physically scarcer than domestic water globally

For many years, virtual water trade has been viewed as a solution to water scarcity. Is it still true if a country imports even scarcer water?

For the first time, a recent study from the MWM group compared the scarcity of imported virtual water and domestic water for 158 countries over 30 years!

The study, published in Water Research, reveals that most countries import scarcer water than their domestic water. Even more striking, this pattern has remained remarkably persistent for 30 years over 100 countries.

These results raise important questions:

• How can we tell the virtual water trade story in the future?
• How can global trade be reformed to better support water sustainability?

Read the paper here:

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.watres.2026.126526

The dataset behind this study is fully available via:

 https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20641008

The dataset contains annual country-level virtual water imports, exports, and domestic water consumption per sector, distinguishing sustainably consumed and overconsumed water. Via this dataset, one can get the water footprint on the production side, consumption side, and virtual water trade, covering all 207 sectors from 158 countries from 1990 to 2019.

Bilateral virtual water trade per sector over the period of 2015-2019 is available in this interactive online tool (https://tools.waterfootprint.org/virtual-water/#/world-map).

Feel free to contact Han Su for any more information: h.su@utwente.nl