Delft University of Technology
Hydro-social metabolism: Scaling of birth rates with regional water use
Pande, Saket; Pandit, Akshay
Publication date 2019
Document Version Final published version
Citation (APA)
Pande, S., & Pandit, A. (2019). Hydro-social metabolism: Scaling of birth rates with regional water use. Poster session presented at EGU General Assembly 2019 , Vienna, Austria.
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Geophysical Research Abstracts Vol. 21, EGU2019-15622, 2019 EGU General Assembly 2019
© Author(s) 2019. CC Attribution 4.0 license.
Hydro-social metabolism: Scaling of birth rates with regional water use
Saket Pande (1) and Akshay Pandit (2)
(1) Delft University of Technology, Department of water management, Delft, Netherlands (s.pande@tudelft.nl), (2) University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Illinois, USA
Population growth is often intuitively linked with proportionally higher use of
fresh water resources. However, this implies that water use per capita does not change with population growth. We not only find that birth rates of regions are negatively related with its water use per capita (i.e. higher birth rate is associated with lower water use), but also that birth rates scale with the latter with a negative power. We use population and water withdrawal data from 1950 to 2005 at irregular 5-year intervals; with virtual water content, virtual
water trade and agricultural production data from 1960 to 2000 for the seven continents to investigate the scaling relationship and interpret it through the lens of metabolism theory. Our analysis reveals that the scaling exponent lies between−1/3 and−1/2. Deviations from the power relationship are observed for Europe and Africa, which are attributed to lower than expected and higher than expected birth rates, respectively. Europe’s deviation from the average scaling relationship may be due to the higher rate of return on human capital in industrialized countries. But why Africa deviates, while other developing and developed regions follow the power relationship more closely, remains a puzzle.
