How much water do we really appropriate? A revised water footprint and its application in the agriculture and forestry of south-central Chile

Water scarcity is a widespread issue for society. The water footprint (WF) is a widely used method to quantify water use, but concerns exist about its capacity to correctly assess the volume of water appropriated by human activities. In this article, we proposed and applied a novel approach to estimate the WF based on the Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production (HANPP) framework. Our method resulted in a total WF of 5,023 Mm 3 /yr (60.8% blue WF, 39.2% green WF) for the study area (South-Central Chile), a value 2.7 times lower than the conventional methodology. The differences are attributed to green WF, as its calculation using our proposed methodology resulted in values 5.3 times lower. Overall, 44.8% of the total WF was linked to virtual water flows associated with the export of agricultural and forestry products. Our study underscores the need for improved water accounting methods as a basis for more sustainable management.