As part of the National Geographic World Water Project my PhD project aims to identify internal and external drivers of water scarcity at hotspots and to intercompare these to find (an) appropriate indicator(s) to find potential future hotspots in water scarcity. Moreover, this project aims to evaluate the impact of actions and policies for sustainable water use on the water resources at these hotspots. The approach of this study will be focused on quantitative research, applying different (big data) statistical analyzing techniques on large spatiotemporal datasets with high resolutions. Also, different socio-hydrological or physically based modelling techniques will be used to simulate future impacts of drivers and pressures on water resources and estimate the impact of actions and policies that alleviate water scarcity.