River Basins as Countries: A New World Map

I’ve spent years drawing maps and staring at political boundaries, always wondering: what if we threw out those arbitrary lines and started over? What if, instead of following the legacy of colonial empires and ancient wars, our borders traced something more fundamental—the flow of water itself?

That question led me to create a series of world maps that reimagine our planet not as a collection of nations, but as a collection of river basins. Each “country” follows the natural watershed of a major river system. It’s a cartographic thought experiment, but it also shows how we might better manage our shared resources.

Understanding River Basins

Watersheds don’t care about politics. A drainage basin is an open system that constantly exchanges matter and energy with its surroundings.

This natural division of land has been crucial to human civilization since its inception. They’ve given us irrigation for crops, highways for commerce, and the water we need for everything from drinking to manufacturing. Each basin has its own personality—its own climate patterns, ecological characteristics, and responses to seasonal changes.

So what if we actually organized ourselves around these natural units? Several advantages become clear:

• Water Management: Right now, water crosses borders without asking permission. A river doesn’t recognize when it leaves one country and enters another. Managing an entire watershed as a single unit could eliminate many of the inefficiencies and inequities we see today.
• Environmental Protection: Ecosystems rarely fit neatly inside political boundaries. A basin-wide approach could make conservation efforts work as integrated systems rather than fragmented pieces.
• Disaster Response: When floods hit or droughts settle in, they affect entire watersheds. Coordinating responses across a whole basin rather than trying to patch together efforts from multiple competing jurisdictions would be more effective.
• Tailored Development: Every basin is different. Some are arid, others tropical. Some drain mountains, others meander across plains. Development strategies that recognize these differences could be more sustainable and effective.
• Water Conflicts: A lot of international disputes boil down to who gets the water. Basin-based boundaries might not eliminate these conflicts, but they could reframe them in more productive ways.

With all this in mind, I set out to see what the world might actually look like if we redrew the map along watershed lines.

Reimagining Countries as Watersheds

The first map I created shows the world divided into “nations” defined by major river basins. I used watershed data from the HydroSHEDS project—a massive undertaking by WWF that began back in 2006 to create free, high-resolution hydrological data for the entire planet.

The map looks alien. Familiar continents suddenly fragment into unfamiliar shapes. In this alternate world, countries bear the names of their dominant rivers:

• Amazonia (Amazon River)
• Congolia (Congo River)
• Mississippia (Mississippi River)
• Obistan (Ob River)
• Nilotic (Nile River)
• Paranáland (Paraná River)
• Yeniseiland (Yenisei River)
• Lenaria (Lena River)
• Amuria (Amur River)
• Nigerland (Niger River)

Looking at the world this way highlights something we often forget: the planet organizes itself through water flow, and within each basin, everything connects.

The World’s Largest Basin Countries

Curious about which “countries” would dominate this watershed world, I calculated basin areas using ArcGIS’s Calculate Geometry tool with a Miller Cylindrical projection.

According to my calculations, the ten largest countries in our river basin world would be:

Country Name	Area (km²)	Area (sq mi)	Current Basin Name
Amazonia	5,888,270	2,273,470	Amazon
Congolia	3,705,240	1,430,600	Congo
Mississippia	3,240,630	1,251,210	Mississippi
Obistan	3,088,720	1,192,560	Ob
Nilotic	3,057,780	1,180,610	Nile
Paranáland	2,646,310	1,021,740	Paraná
Yeniseiland	2,505,680	967,450	Yenisei
Lenaria	2,453,660	947,360	Lena
Amuria	2,238,980	864,470	Amur
Nigerland	2,123,000	819,690	Niger

This table showcases the vast territories these river systems encompass, often spanning multiple countries in our current geopolitical landscape.

Climate Characteristics of Basin Countries

To further explore the nature of these basin-defined nations, I created two additional world map posters focusing on climatic conditions.

Temperature Distribution

To add another layer to this watershed world, I pulled in climate data using WorldClim’s bioclimatic variables. Specifically, I used BIO1 (Annual Mean Temperature) and ran it through ArcGIS’s Zonal Statistics tool to find the median temperature for each basin.

The temperature map produced some interesting results. The ten warmest “countries” all share the same scorching median temperature of 31°C (87.8°F)—every one of them a tiny watershed in East Africa or the Arabian Peninsula. At the other extreme, the coldest basins huddle in Greenland with median temperatures around -26°C (-14.8°F).

One basin particularly caught my attention: Yanaland, named for the Yana River. This basin contains Verkhoyansk, often called the coldest city on Earth, yet its median annual temperature comes in at -15°C (5°F)—cold by any standard, but not quite the extreme you might expect from its reputation.

Precipitation Patterns

For precipitation, I used WorldClim’s BIO12 variable and summed all the rainfall within each basin using Zonal Statistics. The numbers are impressive. Take Amazonia—it receives 12,884 km³ (3,090 cubic miles) of rain every year. Yet the Amazon River itself only discharges about 7,280 km³ into the ocean annually (according to Wikipedia), roughly 17% of global river flow. Where does the rest go? It evaporates, gets absorbed by soil and vegetation, living organisms, or is used in human activities.

Country	River Basin	Annual Precipitation (km³)	Annual Precipitation (cubic miles)
Amazonia	Amazon	12,884	3,090
Congolia	Congo	5,638	1,352
Paranáland	Paraná	3,351	804
Mississippia	Mississippi	3,171	761
Obistan	Ob	2,506	601
Yangzonia	Yangtze	2,271	545
Orinocia	Orinoco	2,139	513
Yeniseiland	Yenisei	2,118	508
Gangetia	Ganges	2,118	508
Nilotic	Nile	1,962	471

These numbers really drive home the importance of watershed management. In places like India, where roughly 70% of people depend on agriculture, effective watershed development isn’t just theoretical—it’s the difference between prosperity and crisis. Done right, watershed management reduces erosion, recharges groundwater, controls flooding, and improves water quality throughout the system.

Population Distribution in Basin Countries

Next, I wanted to see where people actually live in this watershed world. Using the same Zonal Statistics approach with population data from SEDAC (the Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center), I mapped out how humanity distributes itself across these river basins.

The most densely populated basins cluster where you’d expect—in Asia, where major rivers have supported civilizations for millennia:

Country	River Basin	Population
Gangetia	Ganges	752,847,000
Yangzonia	Yangtze	488,390,000
Industan	Indus	240,040,000
Nilotic	Nile	239,592,000
Nigerland	Niger	140,466,000
Congolia	Congo	138,283,000
Huangland	Huang	137,219,000
Duliujianstan	Duliujian	122,545,000
Krishnaland	Krishna	94,072,000
Paranáland	Paraná	93,252,200

According to the population density map, the highest concentrations of people can be found in tiny watersheds along the coasts of Africa and Asia. This creates a real challenge for watershed management—in densely packed areas, human activity can overwhelm a basin’s natural capacity to filter and recycle water.

Economic Landscape of Basin Countries

Finally, I explored the economic potential of our basin countries using the Zonal Statistics tool and GDP raster data for 2025 (in millions of US dollars) from SEDAC.

Country	River Basin	GDP (millions USD)
Mississippia	Mississippi	2,027,780
Rhineland	Rhine	1,465,420
Yangzonia	Yangtze	1,366,450
Laurentia	St. Lawrence	1,366,110
Danubia	Danube	751,730
Kamtinland	Kam Tin	699,610
Elbeland	Elbe	572,320
Hanland	Han	451,490
Seinia	Seine	422,530
Povia	Po	399,230

The economic leaders aren’t always the biggest or most populous basins. Size doesn’t automatically translate to wealth.

The per capita GDP map produced some truly surprising outliers:

• The Aloh Besar River basin in Bahrain: 464 people, $2,260 million GDP ($4,866,030 per capita)
• Crystal River basin in Florida: 191 residents, $910 million GDP ($4,757,180 per capita)
• River Mite basin in the UK: 263 inhabitants, $1,000 million GDP ($3,605,710 per capita)

The Potential of Watershed-Based Management

Creating these maps wasn’t just an exercise in cartographic creativity. It got me considering what basin-wide management could actually accomplish. There are some well-established principles that could work much more effectively if we managed resources at the watershed scale:

• Utilizing land according to its capacity
• Maintaining adequate vegetation cover on the soil
• Conserving rainwater where it falls through in-situ conservation
• Managing excess water to prevent erosion and recharge groundwater
• Maximizing productivity per unit of area, time, and water
• Increasing cropping intensity through intercropping and sequence cropping
• Safely utilizing marginal lands through alternative land use systems
• Ensuring ecosystem sustainability within the watershed
• Maximizing income from the interrelated crop-livestock-tree-labor complex over time

Apply these principles across an entire watershed, and you could see real improvements in how we manage water, protect ecosystems, and develop sustainably.

Wrapping Up

Mapping the world by watersheds instead of political boundaries does more than create interesting visuals. It reminds us that water doesn’t respect the lines we draw, and that our planet functions as a series of interconnected systems that often bear little resemblance to our geopolitical divisions.

Will we actually redraw borders to match watersheds? Almost certainly not. But this exercise points to something important: as we grapple with climate change, water scarcity, and resource competition, organizing around watersheds rather than countries might help us develop solutions that actually work with natural systems instead of against them.

The maps suggest a different way of seeing our world—one where the flow of water defines the boundaries of cooperation, where ecosystem health carries as much weight as economic growth, and where we recognize that what happens upstream inevitably affects what happens downstream.

What do you see in these maps? Could watershed-based management change how we approach global challenges? Would aligning resources with natural boundaries help or create new problems? I’d love to hear your perspective in the comments below.

If you’re interested in exploring more traditional world maps, check out these highly-rated options available on Amazon:

• National Geographic World Map (Classic Style)
• Antique-Style World Map Poster
• Scratch-Off World Map

An animated version of the basin maps shown above is available on my YouTube channel.