Variable WRI of nine · scored for every 1 km site
Water is the one input that cannot be substituted, manufactured, or imported at the scale modern agriculture and dense settlement require.
Water is the defining constraint of twenty-first-century land value. As the hydrological cycle accelerates and groundwater depletion continues across the world's major aquifer systems, the difference in value between water-secure and water-stressed land is widening — and doing so in ways that current land prices do not yet fully reflect.
Arcanium measures water availability as a physical fact rather than an inference: how far a site sits from flowing surface water, and how much water is actually flowing there. Distance alone would be misleading — a kilometre from a major river and a kilometre from a seasonal creek are not the same proposition — so volume and proximity are combined into a single availability score.
The measure is deliberately restricted to fresh surface water. A coastal desert sits beside limitless seawater and has no water availability at all; a measure that counted the ocean would invert the answer exactly where it matters most.
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