ABSTRACT
As the world population is projected to rise to 8.5 billion by 2030 and 9.7 billion by 2050, Asia is at the centre of major demographic change with a predicted population of 5.2 billion by 2050 (UNDESA, 2015). Countries in the region are seeing dramatic socioeconomic change, growth in consumption per capita driven by high gross domestic product (GDP) growth, runaway urbanisation and high mobility. The combination of population growth and economic growth with an increased use of water for agriculture and industry are likely to exacerbate water stress in Asia (Shiklomanov 2000; Rosegrant et al. 2009; Hijioka et al. 2014, p. 1338). These patterns emerge against the broader picture of global change, and the strong domination of Earth systems by humans, that is increasingly subsumed under the metaphor of the ‘Anthropocene’, the epoch where humans have overtaken other processes to become the most important geological agents (Vitousek et al. 1997; Crutzen and Stoermer 2000). The neologism ‘Anthropocene’ derives from the name of the present geological epoch, the Holocene, with anthropo- indicating human and -cene, derived from Greek kainos, indicating new or recent.
