Water Stress is calculated as the percentage of a country’s territory affected by oversubscription of water resources. The 2008 EPI utilizes data from the University of New Hampshire’s Water Systems Analysis Group. The target for each country is to have no area of their territory affected by oversubscription. Water use is represented by local demands summed by domestic, industrial, and agricultural water withdrawals and then divided by available water supply to yield an index of local relative water use. A high degree of oversubscription is indicated when the water use is more than 40% of available supply (WMO, 1997).
Each dot in the histogram is a single country’s proximity-to-target score for this indicator. The tinted box represents the inner quartile range of country values, or points lying between the 25th and 75th percentiles. The small triangle marker at the bottom of the chart indicates the median of country scores.
