Climate Change and Water Security: Water Scarcity and Water Flood

Definitions

Insufficiency of fresh available water, or water scarcity as it is called, results either from a basic lack of water or from a lack of suitable infrastructure. The basic lack of water is distinguished as physical water scarcity while the lack of suitable infrastructure refers to economic water scarcity. Both of these factors can have an important impact on water availability. Nevertheless, physical water scarcity has been reported to cause greater impact to ecological systems mainly because of the influence of the climate change as well as human influence (Bond, Burrows, Kennard, & Bunn, 2019). Two main scenarios of water reduction have been defined in literature; aridity and drought. Drought is a natural and temporal water shortage consisting of lower precipitation and leading to reduced carrying capacity of the ecosystems (Santos Pereira et al., 2009). Aridity is another manifestation of water shortage where the consequences on human and ecosystem are long lasting, irreversible, and may lead to desertification (Water, 2006). The International Convention on Desertification has explained it as ‘the degradation of land in arid, semi-arid and sub- humid dry areas caused by climatic changes and human activities’(Kassas, 1995). Accordingly, the linked impacts of any sort of water unavailability has a great impact on human being and the environment.