Renewable Internal Freshwater Resources per Capita 1998

Report year 1998·Data year 1998

Renewable internal freshwater (cubic metres per person)·Higher is better — rank 1 leads·Published by Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)

62 reference years (1961–2022), covering 143 to 183 countries, from FAO AQUASTAT via the World Bank’s indicator API (ER.H2O.INTR.PC). How much renewable freshwater a country generates inside its own borders each year, divided by its population. This is the measure the Falkenmark thresholds rest on — below 1,700 cubic metres a head is water stress and below 1,000 is scarcity — which is why more is genuinely better here and not merely larger. ⚠ INTERNAL RESOURCES ONLY. A country living off a river that rises somewhere else reads far lower than the water it actually has: Egypt and Iraq are the obvious cases, and it makes them look drier than they are while saying something true about how much of their water is theirs to control. ⚠ The figures move mostly because POPULATION moves; the water itself is revised rarely. ⚠ These are not separate published reports — `restatedByReport` names the World Development Indicators release they were pulled from. ⚠ A statistic, not an index: no rank is published, so none is stored, and it is not in the Country Index; the POSITION shown on the statistics page is derived here by ordering the score, and labelled as ours.

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