The Water Security Index is a free, public reference for cross-national water security. It's part of Clay Indices, a small network of raw-data sites built on one idea: take public figures, organize them honestly, rank them, cite them, and let the reader conclude.
Good water data already exists — at the FAO, at the WHO and UNICEF, at the World Bank. What's missing is a place that puts it in front of an ordinary reader without an agenda wrapped around it. Water is a subject that attracts alarm; most coverage arrives with the conclusion already drawn and the crisis already declared. We'd rather hand you the table, the threshold and the definition and trust you with the rest. Water stress is a measurable thing, and our edge is measuring it neutrally rather than sounding the alarm.
Present raw facts; never tell the reader what to conclude. The data and the ranking are the article. A clean "countries ranked by X" is inherently shareable and argument-provoking, and that's by design. But "raw" means raw correct: the right denominator, the measure labeled for what it counts, the confounds flagged rather than buried — internal versus total renewable water above all. That discipline is the whole brand. See the methodology for how we hold it.
Everything here is free to read and free to reuse with attribution. Every ranking and comparison can be downloaded as a CSV. If you cite a figure, cite the source we cite — FAO AQUASTAT, the WHO/UNICEF JMP, or the World Bank — and you're on solid ground.
The data pipeline and much of the writing are built with AI assistance and reviewed before publishing. The figures in the Notes are computed from the same data that feeds the tables, so the prose can't drift from the numbers. Where we're unsure, we say so.