Aquastress D2.1.4 - External paper on the Aquastress Water Stress Index (AWSI) including external experts vision

[Departement_IRSTEA]RE [TR1_IRSTEA]GES / USAGES; Water stress is a global problem with far-reaching local economic and social implications. Extreme examples of water stress are climatic events as the long- rolonged drought period in the Iberian Peninsula or. In an era of high implication due to climatic changes, good management practices are needed to combat water stress. However, water resources management in the past has often been derived from a perspective where the different components of environment-technology-human systems were clearly separated and approached in a sequential fashion (Pahl-Wostl, 2002). The mitigation of water stress at local scale depends not just on technological innovations, but also on the development of new integrated water management tools and decision-making practices. This paper presents the implementation of a framework for assessing water stress described in detail by Sullivan et al., 2007. The framework is designed to assess the degree of water stress the different sectors face within a region. Our target focused on relatively small catchments in opposite to the main frameworks for describing water stress. The aim of the framework reaches further than just an assessment. It improves systems' coping capacities by focusing attention directly on the water stressors at the sectoral level. The method is sufficiently flexible to accommodate diverse mitigation options for water stress, whose contexts are location specific without presupposing the constraints of unique-size tailoring. However, the framework generates an index that can be employed to evaluate the relative water stress of diverse catchments to multiple sectoral water stressors and to their potential interactions.