Global Water Resources and Withdrawal Dataset

What this looks like

One real series from the dataset, and real rows from the head of its published extract. Neither is a mock-up: the rows below are the same rows, unchanged, that are in the file you would download.

Total renewable freshwater resources at Angola

The longest single series this dataset holds — 62 annual values, one of 1,263. The dataset is not this chart.

Drawn to show the shape and resolution of what the dataset contains, not to make a point about Angola. Gaps are breaks, never interpolated.

View the data behind this chart

Underlying data
Period	Angola (km³/yr)
1961	148
1962	148
1963	148
1964	148
1965	148
1966	148
1967	148
1968	148
1969	148
1970	148
1971	148
1972	148
1973	148
1974	148
1975	148
1976	148
1977	148
1978	148
1979	148
1980	148
1981	148
1982	148
1983	148
1984	148
1985	148
1986	148
1987	148
1988	148
1989	148
1990	148
1991	148
1992	148
1993	148
1994	148
1995	148
1996	148
1997	148
1998	148
1999	148
2000	148
2001	148
2002	148
2003	148
2004	148
2005	148
2006	148
2007	148
2008	148
2009	148
2010	148
2011	148
2012	148
2013	148
2014	148
2015	148
2016	148
2017	148
2018	148
2019	148
2020	148
2021	148
2022	148

Sample rows

12 of 22,565 rows Taken from the start of observations-resources-worldbank-wdi.csv. These are sample rows, not the dataset.

Sample rows from the Global Water Resources and Withdrawal Dataset extract
`metric_id`	`subject_id`	`subject_kind`	`value`	`censored`	`censor_operator`	`censor_threshold`	`censor_limit`	`censor_reported`	`unit`	`period_start`	`period_end`	`period_kind`	`basis`	`confidence`	`source_id`	`source_ref`	`qualifier`	`superseded`	`retrieved`
renewable-water-per-capita	country-afg	geography	5013.607452	—	—	—	—	—	m³/person/yr	1962-01-01	1962-12-31	year	calculated	medium	worldbank-wdi	World Bank WDI indicator ER.H2O.INTR.PC	—	—	2026-10-01
renewable-water-per-capita	country-afg	geography	4909.163811	—	—	—	—	—	m³/person/yr	1963-01-01	1963-12-31	year	calculated	medium	worldbank-wdi	World Bank WDI indicator ER.H2O.INTR.PC	—	—	2026-10-01
renewable-water-per-capita	country-afg	geography	4804.205448	—	—	—	—	—	m³/person/yr	1964-01-01	1964-12-31	year	calculated	medium	worldbank-wdi	World Bank WDI indicator ER.H2O.INTR.PC	—	—	2026-10-01
renewable-water-per-capita	country-afg	geography	4698.083142	—	—	—	—	—	m³/person/yr	1965-01-01	1965-12-31	year	calculated	medium	worldbank-wdi	World Bank WDI indicator ER.H2O.INTR.PC	—	—	2026-10-01
renewable-water-per-capita	country-afg	geography	4592.653994	—	—	—	—	—	m³/person/yr	1966-01-01	1966-12-31	year	calculated	medium	worldbank-wdi	World Bank WDI indicator ER.H2O.INTR.PC	—	—	2026-10-01
renewable-water-per-capita	country-afg	geography	4487.929184	—	—	—	—	—	m³/person/yr	1967-01-01	1967-12-31	year	calculated	medium	worldbank-wdi	World Bank WDI indicator ER.H2O.INTR.PC	—	—	2026-10-01
renewable-water-per-capita	country-afg	geography	4383.224123	—	—	—	—	—	m³/person/yr	1968-01-01	1968-12-31	year	calculated	medium	worldbank-wdi	World Bank WDI indicator ER.H2O.INTR.PC	—	—	2026-10-01
renewable-water-per-capita	country-afg	geography	4279.590601	—	—	—	—	—	m³/person/yr	1969-01-01	1969-12-31	year	calculated	medium	worldbank-wdi	World Bank WDI indicator ER.H2O.INTR.PC	—	—	2026-10-01
renewable-water-per-capita	country-afg	geography	4176.214831	—	—	—	—	—	m³/person/yr	1970-01-01	1970-12-31	year	calculated	medium	worldbank-wdi	World Bank WDI indicator ER.H2O.INTR.PC	—	—	2026-10-01
renewable-water-per-capita	country-afg	geography	4076.016365	—	—	—	—	—	m³/person/yr	1971-01-01	1971-12-31	year	calculated	medium	worldbank-wdi	World Bank WDI indicator ER.H2O.INTR.PC	—	—	2026-10-01
renewable-water-per-capita	country-afg	geography	3977.662326	—	—	—	—	—	m³/person/yr	1972-01-01	1972-12-31	year	calculated	medium	worldbank-wdi	World Bank WDI indicator ER.H2O.INTR.PC	—	—	2026-10-01
renewable-water-per-capita	country-afg	geography	3878.10527	—	—	—	—	—	m³/person/yr	1973-01-01	1973-12-31	year	calculated	medium	worldbank-wdi	World Bank WDI indicator ER.H2O.INTR.PC	—	—	2026-10-01

Download these rows as CSV — the same twelve, with the column header, for testing a loader before committing to the full file.

Methodology

Collected from the World Bank World Development Indicators under CC BY 4.0. The World Bank relays material originated by other bodies — chiefly the FAO AQUASTAT programme and the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme — and the originator is recorded per indicator. Sector shares are validated as a set: where the three do not sum to 100 ± 2 for a country-year, all three are dropped, because Hydrionis does not know which of the three is wrong and therefore publishes none of them.

What this dataset cannot tell you

Coverage

Subjects	Countries and territories — 186 held
Period	1961–2022
Units	%, km³/yr, m³/person/yr
Update cadence	Annually
Identifier	`global-water-resources` v1.0.0

Fields

Data dictionary →

Every metric this dataset carries, with the unit it is stored in and the geography level it is reported at. Full definitions are in the data dictionary.

Identifier	Field	Unit	Reported at
`renewable-water-resources`	Total renewable freshwater resources The long-term average annual flow of rivers and recharge of groundwater generated by precipitation within a country, plus inflows from upstream countries.	km³/yr	country
`renewable-water-per-capita`	Renewable freshwater per person Total renewable freshwater resources divided by population.	m³/person/yr	country
`water-withdrawal-total`	Total freshwater withdrawal The total volume of freshwater taken from rivers, lakes and aquifers for all uses in a year, before any of it is returned.	km³/yr	country
`water-stress`	Water stress Freshwater withdrawal as a percentage of available renewable freshwater resources, after accounting for environmental flow requirements.	%	country, river-basin
`withdrawal-agriculture-share`	Agricultural share of withdrawal Percentage of total freshwater withdrawal used by agriculture.	%	country
`withdrawal-industry-share`	Industrial share of withdrawal Percentage of total freshwater withdrawal used by industry, including energy cooling.	%	country
`withdrawal-municipal-share`	Municipal share of withdrawal Percentage of total freshwater withdrawal supplied through public water systems.	%	country

Rights and access

Licence position

Open with attribution. Derivative use true; redistribution true; commercial reuse true.

Permitted uses

Public display
Derived analysis
API delivery
Bulk download
Commercial use

Available to: Public, Developer, Research, Professional, Enterprise. These follow from the rights of the contributing publishers, not from a Hydrionis pricing decision — no access tier can widen what a publisher withheld.

Contributing sources

World Bank — World Development Indicators (CC BY 4.0)

Attribution and citation

Cite and reuse →

Two different obligations, deliberately kept apart. One is a condition of somebody else's licence; the other is a request Hydrionis has no standing to enforce.

Attribution you are required to give

These are conditions of the licences the underlying data is published under. They are obligations to the publishers, not to Hydrionis, and they apply to you directly whether or not you mention Hydrionis at all.

Data from World Bank, used under CC BY 4.0.

World Bank — CC BY 4.0 (licence text)

Suggested citation for Hydrionis

Hydrionis (2026), Global Water Resources and Withdrawal Dataset, version 1.0.0, accessed 2026-10-05, hydrionis.com/data/datasets/global-water-resources/

Cite Hydrionis where you rely on the compilation, the normalisation, the eligibility judgements or a chart. Where you use an unmodified published value, the publisher’s attribution is the one that is required; crediting Hydrionis as well is welcome and is not something Hydrionis can require of you.

Recommended, not required. Hydrionis does not claim rights over unmodified public data it relayed, and doing arithmetic on somebody else’s measurements does not make them Hydrionis’s. Cite the version and the access date: Global Water Resources and Withdrawal Dataset changes as publishers release and as methods are revised, and a citation without both cannot be checked later. Full guidance is on cite and reuse.

Changelog

Version 1.0.0 — 2026-08-24

First release. Replaces the hand-transcribed country layer carried before automated collection.

Breaking changes

The previous transcribed country observations are retired. Their identifiers no longer resolve.

Corrections

106 country-years of sector shares were withdrawn where the three shares did not sum to 100%, including Bolivia 2020–21 at 612% and Namibia at 155% agriculture.

Additions

Full annual series in place of single reference values.

Use this data

Download resources observations from World Bank (22,565 rows) (CSV)
Download sector-use observations from World Bank (18,241 rows) (CSV)
Download withdrawal observations from World Bank (6,780 rows) (CSV)
Download stress observations from World Bank (6,672 rows) (CSV)
Machine-readable JSON /api/v1/datasets/global-water-resources.json
How to cite this, and who you must credit
How these figures were produced
Request this at a different scale, format or geography

Every bulk extract ships with a companion metadata file carrying this dataset’s version, its sources, their licences, the attribution you are required to give and the suggested citation — so the terms travel with the file rather than staying on this page.

About this data

The fields a professional user needs to judge whether this is fit for a particular purpose. Deliberately not a score.

About this data

Everything below is a property of the data rather than a rating of it. There is deliberately no single confidence score: how much a gap matters depends on what you are about to do with the series, and only you know that.

Source	World Bank — World Development Indicators · CC BY 4.0
How the values came to exist	Mixed across the series — the basis is recorded on every individual value.
Period held	1961–2022
Known gaps	National aggregates conceal enormous internal variation. A country figure describes an accounting total, not the situation of anyone living in it. Reporting years differ between countries, and many values are the most recent available rather than the year requested. The World Bank publishes under CC BY 4.0, but relayed third-party material may carry the originator’s own terms. Verify with the originator before commercial reuse.
Continuity	Version 1.0.0, released 2026-08-24. 1 recorded version; breaking changes and corrections are listed in the changelog above.
Last read from the publisher	2026-10-01 · publisher updates annually
Redistribution	Permitted by the upstream licences
Commercial reuse	Permitted by the upstream licences. No Hydrionis access tier can widen this.
Methodology	How this was produced