significance of development on water scarcity

As I promised this blog will be on the significance of development status on the the issue of water scarcity. Now the reference I shall use in this blog came to me by accident, let me explain. For this course on global environmental change we have a reading list. Now me being a keen bean decided to read the readings back in September. However only a week ago I realised that that all the many readings I had done were from last years reading list. This was very annoying at the time because I had to start all over again, but seeing as this reference has been useful, I am less annoyed. So the reference I am using is here:Vorosmarty, 2010 

The question I shall aim to target in this blog is:

Are poor and rich countries or in other words termed developed or developing countries equally at risk of water scarcity?

Well the verdict from this article is that highly developed regions with high incident threat (for example, United States, Western Europe) often show much lower adjusted threat indices as a result of massive investments in water infrastructure. Now when I mean massive I mean the total value is in the trillions of US dollars, so Im not exaggerating. These 'massive'  investments by  high-income countries benefits 850 million people by lowering their exposure to high incident threat by 95%. As we move to upper middle income countries the  corresponding values are 140 million people and 23%. Whereas developing countries vulnerability remains high due to minimal investment, with 3.4 billion people in these areas ( for example most of Africa, large areas in central Asia and countries including China, India , Peru  or Bolivia) showing the highest adjusted threat category. So what we see is that incident human water security threat is a rising but saturating function of per capita GDP. On the other hand adjusted human water security declines sharply in affluent countries in response to technological investments: the latter closely

resembles the environmental Kuznet curve as shown below.

                                               

This Kuznetsk curve describes rising ambient stressors loads during early to middle stages of economic growth followed by reduced loading through environmental controls established as developments continues. 

So the long and short of my answer is: more developed countries are the most threatened as seen by the table below ( as a result of high development and high population using more water) however technological investments mean they can offset high stressor levels whilst not necessarily remedying their underlying causes- hence shifting them from most to least threatened. Whereas a lack of water infrastructure in less wealthy nations mean they remain vulnerable.  

To add salt to a wound this lack of water infrastructure creates dire economic impacts in developing countries. For example Ethiopia  has 150 times less reservoir storage per capita than North America 32 and its climate and hydrological variability takes a 38% toll on gross domestic product (GDP).Therefore without major policy and financial commitments, these stark contrasts in human water security will continue to separate rich from poor.