The dataset provides annual water withdrawal and consumption estimates for Europe at a spatial resolution of 5 arcminutes, covering the period from 2020 to 2100 for four SSPs (1, 2, 3, and 5). Below, we outline the procedure used to downscale the population projections to a 5-arcminute resolution and describe the main equations applied to project water withdrawal and consumption under different SSPs.

The development of the high-resolution (5 arcminute) projected water withdrawal and consumption for Europe follows the methodology outlined by Wada et al. (2011a, 2011b). This new release incorporates new projections for population, GDP per capita, and urbanization patterns from the latest SSP database (v3.0.1; available at https://data.ece.iiasa.ac.at/ssp/). Since this update is still in progress as of August 25th, 2024, some necessary input data are sourced from an earlier version of the SSP data (SSP 2013, see Table 1).  All data and methods used to generate the results provided in this dataset are described in the Readme - Data and Methods file.

Table 1: Data availability in different versions of the SSP database as of August 25th 2024.