Global freshwater withdrawals: what the World Bank data shows

The world withdrew 3,853 billion cubic meters of freshwater in 2022, according to the World Bank's World Development Indicators (WDI), which republish data from FAO's AQUASTAT database. Agriculture accounted for 71.0% of it, industry for 15.7% and domestic use for 13.3%. Three countries, India, China and the United States, withdrew 43.1% of the total between them, and the ten largest withdrawers accounted for 64.8%.

Every figure in this article comes from the World Bank API, retrieved on 2026-10-08, using the most recent non-empty value for each country. For almost every country that value is for 2022; the two exceptions are noted where they appear.

What "withdrawal" means

A withdrawal is water taken from a river, lake or aquifer. It is not the same as water used up. The WDI definition counts total withdrawals, excluding evaporation losses from storage basins, and includes water from desalination plants in countries where they are a significant source. Industrial withdrawals include water for cooling thermoelectric power plants.

Much of what is withdrawn goes back. Cooling water is returned to the river, warmer. Wastewater from towns flows back after treatment, or without it. Consumption is the part that does not return to the same source in the short term, mainly water evaporated or transpired by irrigated crops and water built into products. A country can therefore have large withdrawals and modest consumption, or the reverse. WDI publishes withdrawals only, so be careful not to describe these figures as "water used up." The withdrawal vs consumption question page covers the distinction in more depth.

The ten largest withdrawers

Shares are each country's value divided by the World Bank's own world aggregate. The ten add up to 2,497.6 billion cubic meters, or 64.8% of the world total. Of the 181 countries with a value, 179 have 2022 data; Israel's and West Bank and Gaza's latest figures are for 2021.

The ranking mostly reflects irrigation. Eight of the ten are in Asia, and in nine of the ten agriculture is the largest use. The United States is the exception, as the sector table below shows.

Per person, the picture changes

Dividing withdrawals by population (World Bank SP.POP.TOTL, 2022) gives withdrawals per person per year. The formula is =withdrawals*1e9/population.

India withdraws the most water in total but slightly less than the world average per person. The United States withdraws almost three times the world average per person. These are national withdrawals by all sectors divided by population, not household water use; domestic use is only a small part of each figure.

How the water is used

All values are 2022. Rows may not add to exactly 100% because each share is rounded to one decimal.

Three patterns stand out:

• In South Asia, agriculture takes about nine liters in every ten withdrawn. In India that is 647.5 × 90.4% = 585.4 billion cubic meters, more than the total withdrawals of any other country in the world.
• In the United States, Canada, France and Germany, industry is the largest category. The WDI definition includes cooling water for thermoelectric power plants, which is withdrawn in large volumes and mostly returned. This is where the withdrawal versus consumption distinction matters most: a large industrial share does not mean industry consumes most of the water.
• The United Kingdom is unusual: 74.0% of its 8.4 billion cubic meters goes to domestic use. That reflects small agricultural and industrial withdrawals, not heavy household use: domestic withdrawals work out to about 92 cubic meters per person a year, against about 175 in the United States.

Water stress: withdrawals against what is available

The water stress indicator (ER.H2O.FWST.ZS, SDG indicator 6.4.2) divides total freshwater withdrawals by total renewable freshwater resources minus the environmental flow requirements, the water rivers and wetlands need to keep functioning. FAO, the custodian of the indicator, classes values below 25% as no stress, 25-50% as low, 50-75% as medium, 75-100% as high and above 100% as critical.

Values above 100% are possible because, as the WDI notes explain, withdrawals can exceed renewable resources where countries pump nonrenewable (fossil) groundwater, rely heavily on desalination, or reuse water. Kuwait's renewable internal freshwater resources per person are recorded as 0 cubic meters.

Of the 178 countries with a stress value, 117 are below 25%, 23 are at 25-50%, 15 at 50-75%, 6 at 75-100% and 17 above 100%. Among the ten largest withdrawers, Pakistan is in the critical class at 110.0%, Iran at 81.3% is high, and India at 66.5% is medium; China is at 41.5% and the United States at 28.2%.

Egypt shows why the indicator uses total rather than internal resources. Its renewable internal freshwater resources are only 9 cubic meters per person, because almost all its water arrives from outside its borders in the Nile. Its stress level, measured against total renewable resources including that inflow, is 141.2%.

Renewable resources per person

ER.H2O.INTR.PC counts only internal resources: river flow and groundwater generated by rainfall inside the country. The world figure for 2022 is 5,393 cubic meters per person. Iceland has 445,023 and Canada 73,170; India has 1,014 and Pakistan 226. Because inflows from upstream countries are excluded, this indicator understates water availability for downstream countries such as Egypt, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Compare it across countries only with that in mind.

A caution about "2022"

AQUASTAT relies on national reports and surveys that many countries carry out infrequently. When no new figure exists, the series repeats the last one. In the WDI time series, India's 2022 withdrawal value of 647.5 billion cubic meters is identical to its value for every year back to 2010, and the United States' 444.3 is the same as its value for every year back to 2015. Of the 179 countries with a 2022 value in the 2000-2022 series, 129 have exactly the same value as in 2021, and 85 have had the same value since 2015 or earlier.

So treat the year as "latest published estimate," not "measured in 2022," and be cautious about reading trends from recent years. If your analysis depends on timing, check when each country's value last changed.

Working with the data

1. Download the indicators from the World Bank API or Data portal, or use the freshwater withdrawals by country workbook, which keeps the year of every value next to it and flags values that have not changed for years.
2. Keep the year column. Mixing a 2021 value with 2022 values is usually acceptable for a cross-section, but say so.
3. Compute sector volumes with =total*share/100. For the world: 3,853.1 × 71.0% = 2,736.3 billion cubic meters for agriculture, 603.7 for industry and 511.5 for domestic use.
4. Use the World Bank's world and regional aggregates rather than summing countries yourself. The 181 country values here sum to 3,855.0 billion cubic meters, close to but not the same as the published world figure of 3,853.1.
5. Join to other country data on ISO3 codes; the world countries geography table carries them with area and population.
6. Credit the source as World Bank, World Development Indicators, with FAO AQUASTAT as the original source, under CC BY 4.0, and state your retrieval date. The citation question page has a ready format, and reliable public datasets for spreadsheets covers other sources worth knowing.