Data Visualization
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Data sources:
Water use data provided by Water Division of the Department of Environment and Climate Change and the Integrated Management Division of the Department of Environmental Assessment, Ministry of Environmental Protection and Agriculture
Georgia is non-water-stressed country. The annual water exploitation index varies from around 2 % to around 5 % . Annual total freshwater use is around 1 400 million m3. Georgia largely abstracts water from surface water (70 %), while groundwater abstraction (30 %) is used mainly used for drinking purposes.
During 2016, about 1 980 million m3 of water was used in Georgia by different economic sectors. More than 70 % of the total water use is allocated to agriculture, while the households sector has the second highest demand for water use. Irrigation is widely used in the agriculture sector. More than 80 % of the water used by agriculture was allocated to irrigation between 1995 and 2008. Since then, the share of agricultural water use for irrigation has substantially decreased, falling to 34 % in 2016.
Although water use for hydropower is not covered by this indicator, Georgia is a country where hydropower is very dominant in electricity generation. Thus, hydropower installations put pressure on the hydromorphology of the Georgian water bodies.
In the transition period after the Soviet Union collapsed, there was a substantial decrease in the total water use in the country. The total freshwater use in 1990 was 3 623 million m3, and this had decreased to 1 979 million m3 by 2016. The sharp decrease seen between 1990 and 2004 has been reversed since then. Agriculture, which is the largest water use sector, has expanded and has increased the total water use in the country and has increased its share compared with other economic sectors.
There has been a tremendous decrease in water use by households. Between 1990 and 2016, water use by households halved, although the country’s total population decreased by only 3 % during the same time period. However, excluding the exceptional time period 1990-2000 from the assessment indicates a trend of increasing water use. The amount of water used in 2001 (1 060 million m3) had almost doubled (an 87 % increase) by 2016, mainly due to high water demand from agriculture and households.
A substantial portion of the freshwater used is lost during transport. On average, one third of the water used is lost in the water transport system. This is very high, which indicates an urgent need to renew the water transport system in the country. Given that only around 60 % of the total population is connected to the public water supply system (2016), the maintenance and rehabilitation of the water transport system in the country is becoming more important, not only for increasing water efficiency but also for improving the sanitation services.
Since 2004, no significant progress has been observed in the improvement of water losses. The combination of high water losses and an increasing demand for water by agriculture and households will eventually expose more acute water efficiency issues in the years to come.