Tracking Water Footprints at the Micro and Meso Scale An Application to Spanish Tourism by Regions and Municipalities

Making the link between the different economic scales-local, regional, and global-and the impacts associated with more global behavior is a natural extension of traditional environmentally extended input-output (I-O) modeling. In this article, we highlight the capabilities of combining the meso level (i.e., regional) I-O models with geographical information systems (GIS) and micro data to lower the spatial scale. This methodology lets us provide information to municipalities (what we call the micro scale) on their water footprints (WFs) at a lower spatial level than that of Spanish regions (what we call meso scale), at which economic I-O data are available. Based on a multiregional I-O model for the Spanish regions, we analyze the local water impacts of tourism activity in Spain. We focus on the explicit spatial identification of areas of strong final demand (normally the most populated) tracking back the associated footprints to the original hotspots or vulnerable areas (micro scale), where most water withdrawal had taken place. The spatial divergence between the production and the consumption responsibilities arise because consumers and producers usually have very different characteristics, particularly with respect to tourism. We find highest geographic dispersion of WFs of consumption arising from domestic tourism, followed by domestic household consumption, and finally foreign tourism WF. Foreign tourism WF is more concentrated in time and space. Foreign tourism in Andalusia requires directly and indirectly (WF) 617 cubic hectometers (hm(3)) and in Madrid 440 hm3, indicating that such tourism in both regions accounts for some of the highest water intensities per euro ((sic)) spent by a foreign tourist, around 0.1 cubic meters/(sic).