Estimation of water requirements by livestock in Europe

•The estimation of livestock water-use is salient to overall water balance assessments.•Water-requirements are calculated for cattle, pigs, poultry, sheep and goats.•Data sources are the FAO livestock density maps and CAPRI data on livestock numbers.•The water-requirements of livestock are temperature-dependent.•Results show good correspondence with EUROSTAT data on water abstraction.

Ecosystem-based thinking can be more easily incorporated into policy and decision making if natural resources are better accounted for. The Blueprint to Safeguard Europe's Water aims to positively contribute to the European Union's Water Policy through a series of studies to assess the quantity and quality of this precious resource. An important part of that water balance is the accounting of water removed from rivers or aquifers by different sectorial needs.The map series presented in this short note shows the water requirements for the livestock sector in particular. These maps are calculated based on livestock density maps for 2005, normalized by the best available field data at continental scale. Water requirements are calculated for cattle, pigs, poultry and sheep and goats. A relationship using air temperature is inferred for the daily water requirements per livestock category. Daily average temperature maps are used in conjunction with the livestock density maps in order to create a temporal series of water requirements for the livestock sector in Europe. This map series is then ingested by the hydrological model along with other water requirements maps for other sectors in order to contribute to the efforts to quantify total water use in the EU.