Water Societal Metabolism in the Yucatán Peninsula
Societal Metabolism · Published 2019 · Journal of Cleaner Production
Overview
The Yucatán Peninsula sits atop one of the world’s largest karst aquifer systems — but its groundwater is both the primary source of freshwater for the region and acutely vulnerable to the dual pressures of economic expansion and climate change. As tourism and agribusiness have grown, water demand has scaled in ways that simple per-capita indicators cannot capture. At the same time, climate projections suggest meaningful reductions in the rainfall that recharges the aquifer.
This project applies MuSIASEM (Multi-Scale Integrated Assessment of Societal and Ecosystem Metabolism) to connect regional socio-economic structure — who is doing what kind of work, in which sectors, at what scale — to water consumption, and then confronts that demand against biophysical constraints from groundwater recharge modelling. The result is a framework that makes visible the structural drivers of water scarcity, rather than treating consumption as a fixed coefficient of population.
The work formed the core of my doctoral thesis at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), supervised by Martí Rosas-Casals and Laura M. Hernández-Terrones.
Methods
Water supply: groundwater recharge modelling
A monthly water balance model was calibrated against 40 years of historical data (1961–2000), capturing the strong seasonality of rainfall and evapotranspiration in the peninsula’s tropical climate. Four downscaled General Circulation Models provided climate projections for 2015–2039, enabling an ensemble estimate of future recharge under different emissions trajectories.
Key result: historical groundwater recharge of 118 ± 33 mm·year⁻¹ (~10 % of annual precipitation), with projections indicating approximately a 23 % decline by 2030 under current socio-economic and climate trajectories.
Water demand: MuSIASEM
MuSIASEM models an economy as a set of nested compartments — household, paid work, and the various productive sectors — and tracks how energy, water, and labour flow between them. Unlike input–output models, it enforces biophysical accounting constraints and is sensitive to the composition of economic activity, not just its aggregate size.
For each sub-region of the Yucatán Peninsula, demand scenarios were constructed by combining:
- Employment structure by sector (agriculture, tourism, industry, services)
- Water intensity coefficients by sector and activity type
- Demographic projections under alternative development pathways
This revealed superlinear scaling between water metabolic rate and total water consumption: as the economy grows and diversifies towards high water-intensity activities, demand grows faster than population.
Integration
Supply (recharge) and demand (MuSIASEM scenarios) were compared at the sub-regional level, identifying where and when demand approaches or exceeds natural recharge limits — a condition two of the four scenarios reach by 2030.
Key findings
- Under current trends, two of four climate-economic scenarios project water demand reaching or exceeding natural groundwater recharge by 2030 in at least one sub-region.
- Aggregate per-capita indicators mask significant variation between sub-regions with different economic compositions; policy responses need to be geographically differentiated.
- Tourism-heavy coastal zones show disproportionately high water intensity relative to their share of population, creating spatial imbalances in aquifer drawdown.
- A 23 % projected decline in recharge combines with demand growth to produce a scissors effect — the crossing point is not a distant abstraction but a near-term planning horizon.
Why societal metabolism?
Standard water management models treat demand as a function of population and fixed sector coefficients. MuSIASEM treats the economy as a metabolic system: its structure determines how intensively each unit of output consumes water, and structural change (a shift from subsistence agriculture to resort tourism, for example) changes the metabolic profile even if population stays constant. This makes the approach sensitive to the kinds of development transitions actually underway in the Yucatán — and elsewhere in the Global South.
Publications
- Rodríguez-Huerta, E., Rosas-Casals, M. & Hernández-Terrones, L.M. (2019). Water societal metabolism in the Yucatan Peninsula: the impact of climate change on the recharge of groundwater by 2030. Journal of Cleaner Production, 235, 272–287. doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2019.06.310
- Rodríguez-Huerta, E., Hernández-Terrones, L.M. & Rosas-Casals, M. (2019). Groundwater recharge assessment in the Yucatán Peninsula karst aquifer using a monthly water balance model and climate projections. Hydrological Sciences Journal. doi:10.1080/02626667.2019.1702989
- Rodríguez Huerta, E. (2020). Societal metabolism focused on water management: application of the MuSIASEM tool in Yucatán Península, México. Doctoral thesis, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. doi:10.5821/dissertation-2117-329757