This assessment and its results, along with the appropriate map were published by World Resources Institute on Thursday. They show the risk of water shortages in 100 river basins, which supply the population and territory of 181 countries.

Informations provided by this study are relevant for the economy, ecology and society of the affected countries, and all the countries in the survey are ranked by scores from 0 to 5 for each of the indicators. Higher score is an indicator for greater exposure to certain specific risk when it comes to water scarcity.

The results show that more than 80 percent of available water is being derived for needs of an average user per year. According to the authors of this study, "companies, farms and the population are very dependent on the limited amount of water and extremely vulnerable if it even comes to the smallest change in supplying."

This is for example the case of Singapore, the Southeast Asian country, which is densely populated and has no fresh water lakes or underground water sources but water demand exceeds the available supply by far, and therefore has the highest index of water scarcity - 5.