IHE Delft 💧 Alumni Online Seminar: Water Accounting+, democratizing data for better decision making
Channel: IHE Delft Institute for Water Education
Date: 2017-12-13

Water Accounting + aims to provide water managers with accurate and timely data about water availability and accessibility. By democratizing the information, this approach institutes transparent and accountable decision making, and so further empowers all stakeholders.

Water connects people. According to the United Nations, there are 263 transboundary lake and river basins covering almost half of the earth's land surface, which amounts to 40% of its population. 145 countries have some territory within international basins. While most of these are shared between two countries, for many the number is much higher. 

Given the degree to which water sources are shared, it has acted as a catalyst for both cooperation and conflict, within and across borders. Transboundary water challenges are ever-present. Perhaps the biggest flashpoint is water scarcity, where demand exceeds supply, often because of allocation decisions upstream. It can equally be due to political and institutional dynamics, such as poor governance. 

Increasingly, regions around the world are at risk from water security. On current population growth trends, the United Nations estimates that by 2025, around 1.8 billion people will live in countries or regions facing water scarcity. Additionally, climate change is also making its mark on the water cycle, with increased variability of flooding, rainfall and droughts. The social and economic consequences are profound. Livelihoods are affected when industries and agriculture which rely on water for production, are deprived access to a supply.

At times of water challenges, diagnosing the root cause of the problem, and so being able to implement an effective solution is problematic. Water Accounting (WA) was an approach developed more than 20 years ago, which set out to aid decision making by measuring how much water goes into and out of a basin, monitoring how the water is used during that journey. It sought to standardize terminology and introduce accurate data. As well as looking at the hydrological aspects of the water cycle, it also takes into account more broadly the resulting benefits and services. 

However, it has faced a number of hurdles. Examples abound of ministries of water and agriculture not collaborating; agencies maintaining their own databases fed by their own network of field sensors; and national governmental data not being shared with provincial entities responsible for operational water management such as irrigation districts, and vice versa. 

Across national borders this secrecy can be even more pronounced with data often jealously guarded, as water is viewed as a vulnerable asset. Two important consequences of this state of affairs for Water Accounting have been that data was often, by necessity, based on ‘best estimates’ and decisions about water allocation were often taken in isolation from stakeholders, behind closed doors.  

Remote sensing technologies are offering powerful tools to address shortfalls in the WA methodology. Professor Wim Bastiaanssen will explain the advantages of WA+ and how it provides a solid basis for unbiased information which does not require widespread collaboration across organizations, with agreed means of collection, and to known quality standards. The data is crucially also often already in the public domain through dedicated centres. 

The webinar  Water Accounting+, democratizing data for better decision making by Professor Bastiaanssen  was held on 21 March 2017. It is part of the 'IHE Delft Online Seminars for Alumni and Partners' series. IHE Delft organizes the series in cooperation with TheWaterChannel. They are free and open to anyone to follow.

About the Speaker
Professor Wim Bastiaanssen is IHE Delft's professor of Global Water Accounting, and is professor in Water Resources Management and Remote Sensing at the Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences at the Delft University of Technology.

Prof. Bastiaanssen is the lead developer of Water Accounting Plus (WA+). It produces open access water accounts for river basins that can be used by all stakeholders involved in the strategic planning of scarce water resources.
www.wateraccounting.org

He is a senior remote sensing expert with a specialization in agricultural water management. He has a background in agro-hydrology from Wageningen University. He holds the UNESCO Chair for Global Water Accounting and is a Senior Fellow to the Robert Daugherty Water for Food Institute of the University of Nebraska (Lincoln).

With PhD students, Bastiaanssen conducts research on determining earth surface hydrological and water management processes from satellite measurements including rainfall, evapotranspiration, soil moisture, biomass production, crop water productivity, surface runoff, withdrawals for irrigation and wetlands and groundwater interactions. This forms the basis for regional scale water accounting studies.