Bhubaneswar: Climate change is worsening water scarcity all over the world. In rural areas where there is poor provision of tap water supply, women usually collect water from wells, rivulets, creeks, and other water bodies for their household purposes. This responsibility demands long hours every day, causing physical exhaustion and mental stress. Growing stress of water collection negatively impacts their well-being, revealed a recent study.

A panel of researchers utilised fixed-effects regression and examined the influence of climate conditions on self-reported water collection times across 347 subnational regions spanning four continents. After researching for around three decades, they found that 1°C temperature rise increased daily water collection times by 4 minutes.

By 2050, if greenhouse gas emissions remain high, women without household access may face a 30% increase in daily water collection times, and up to 100% in certain regions. This highlights a gendered dimension of climate impacts, which disproportionately undermines women's welfare.

Availability of water is significantly affected by changing physical factors such as increasing global temperatures and shifting precipitation patterns. Increased temperatures, driven by anthropogenic emissions, accelerate evapotranspiration rates, leading to the depletion of groundwater resources.

Simultaneously, the hydrological cycle intensifies, thereby altering precipitation patterns and enhancing variability on seasonal and annual timescales. These physical factors also face regional uncertainties, presenting a precarious picture of future water availability, the researchers explained.

“We provide simple estimates of welfare metric equivalent of the effects of future climate change on water collection time. These estimates follow the assumption that their values are equal to the opportunity costs of lost working time at the country-specific minimum wage or other welfare activities in terms of lost time in education,” the researchers said in the Journal ‘Nature Communications’.