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Independent rankings built from public data — every figure traceable to the body that published it.
Report year 2003Data year 2003
Freshwater withdrawal as a share of available resources (%)Higher is worse — rank 1 is worst affectedPublished by Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)
24 reference years (2000–2023), covering 176 to 180 countries, read from FAOSTAT's SDG Indicators domain — FAO's own dissemination of SDG indicator 6.4.2, which it computes from AQUASTAT. It measures how much freshwater a country withdraws each year as a share of what is renewably available to it. ⚠ VALUES ABOVE 100% ARE REAL, AND THEY ARE THE POINT. A country over 100 is taking more water than nature replaces — desalinating it, or drawing down groundwater that will not come back. The Gulf states run into the thousands, and Kuwait tops the table at nearly 3,900%. ⚠ THE ROUTE CHANGED ON 2026-09-12, AND IT COST SOMETHING. Until then this came through the World Bank's copy (ER.H2O.FWST.ZS), which ran from 1987 and carried NINE decimals — but froze at 2022, one year outside the Country Index's data window, which is what kept this indicator out of it. FAO's own file publishes 2023, and publishes it to TWO decimals; it starts at 2000 because SDG monitoring does. Fresher and coarser was the deliberate choice, taken with the user on 2026-09-12. ⚠ Unusually, the redistributor held MORE precision than the producer — the reverse of the pattern AGENTS.md warns about, and worth remembering before assuming a producer's file is always the richer one. ⚠ These are not separate published reports — `restatedByReport` names the FAOSTAT SDG release they were pulled from. ⚠ A statistic, not an index: FAO publishes no rank, so none is stored and the POSITION shown on the statistics page is derived here by ordering the score, and labelled as ours. It is a KEY in the Country Index's Risk & Resilience topic from the 2026 edition.
Water Stress 2003 — Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)
Cite as: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. AQUASTAT. Rome: FAO.
Licence: CC BY 4.0
How much freshwater a country withdraws each year as a share of what is renewably available to it — SDG indicator 6.4.2, computed by FAO from AQUASTAT and read from FAOSTAT's own SDG Indicators domain. ⚠ VALUES ABOVE 100% ARE REAL AND ARE THE POINT: a country over 100 is taking more water than nature replaces, by desalinating or by drawing down groundwater that will not come back. ⚠ The series starts in 2000 because SDG monitoring does; the World Bank's copy this replaced ran from 1987 but stopped at 2022. The FAO does not rank countries on it, so no rank is stored and none is derived.
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