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What is Your Water Footprint?

How much water do you consume based on where you are from? How much water do you consume based on what food, beverages, and products you purchase? This data visualization reveals the hidden water content in your nationality and your consumer goods. Label your lunch, your drink, your friends, yourself, even the whole world with its water footprint.

1. Explore

Move your mouse around the map to see the wide range of water information.

2. Compare

Click on a country or item to keep its data in the tray as you continue to explore other countries and items.

3. Label

Click on the 'Print Label' button to bring up a simple label that shows exactly how much water your selection uses.

* notes

  • The bars and colors for 'Water Supply' have been scaled logarithmically so countries with lower values appear at all.
  • There are some gaps in the dataset we used for the visualization. We've re calibrated the display to show where those gaps occur a little better and more correct a few of the discrepancies that we found. Still, there may be a few more that you might be aware of. Or maybe you want to include data for your country which isn't listed. Take a look at the spreadsheet that the visualization loads dynamically here in .csv format (any spreadsheet application should be able to read this text-based file). Check the data and if you think you fill in the gap, feel free to email me with the correction and your reference. Corrections without a valid and trustworthy source will be ignored!

    • Who we are

    created by Joseph Bergen and Nickie Huang

    Joseph & Nickie are currently both students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design

    tools

    • Adobe Flash
    • Adobe Illustrator
    • TextMate

    sources

    1. "2004 Global Clean Water Supply as % of Population," Pacific Institute, accessed March 13, 2011
    2. "Access to Safe Drinking Water, by Country, 1970 to 2004," Pacific Institute, accessed March 13, 2011
    3. "Everything About Water," Pacific Institute, accessed March 13, 2011
    4. "Water Content of Things", Pacific Institute, accessed March 13, 2011
    5. countries.js

    embedding

    if you would like to embed this visualization on your site or blog, feel free to use the html below. Remember though that to look right, the visualization must be 1200px wide by 750px tall!