Anthropogenic Droughts and Chronic Water Scarcity.
Water shortages around the world can no longer be described as seasonal or exceptional. Around 4 billion people already live with severe water scarcity for at least one month every year . In many regions, water scarcity is increasingly driven by persistent long-term over-extraction and quality degradation rather than only by climatic variability. In many systems, water scarcity is therefore defined not only by how much water is available , but by how much of that water meets basicquality standards for human use, food production, and ecosystem health; polluted water or saline water may still appear in volumetric accounts, yet functionally it behaves as if it were not there. Over 1.8 billion people—nearly one in four humans—were living under drought conditions in 2022–2023 , with the vast majority of them in low- and middle-income countries. Drought-related damages, intensified by land degradation, groundwater depletion, and climate change rather than by rainfall deficits alone,...