Global Water Watch

Democratizing earth’s data on water resources

Water, societies, and climate

Water has played a key role in human security throughout history, but attention to water-related threats has been growing in recent years due to increasing water risks. Water demand has increased sharply in many regions of the world as a result of population growth and economic expansion. Climate change is expected to decrease water supply in many regions of the world, alter the timing of water availability, and increase the severity of droughts and floods. These increasing pressures on water resources undermine water security and contribute to conflict, migration, health crises, and food and energy insecurity across the world.

Accurate and timely information on global water resources is essential for managing these growing risks and challenges.

Platform

Global Water Watch, supported by Google and the Water, Peace, and Security Partnership, is a data platform of free, globally accessible near-real-time information on water. It provides information on thousands of global reservoirs and major river systems, helping decision-makers respond to extreme weather events and manage growing risks of climate change.

Global Water Watch is a partnership between Deltares, World Resources Institute (WRI), and World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

The platform uses modern AI and EO algorithms to map dams, produce high-resolution spatiotemporal information on the amount of water stored in reservoirs as well as water level and flow information in major river systems in near-real-time.

Reservoirs

Rivers

Dams

Changes

Use cases

Drought awareness

Assess today's state and amount of surface water resources at the global scale to inform curtailments or disaster response.

Transboundary water management

Provide information on water resources in internationally shared river basins, assess how much water is available, track trends, and detect deviations from normal years.

River basin and reservoir planning

Provide information to complement local data on water use and demands to analyze stocks and balances, plan the forthcoming growing season, and manage abstraction permits.

Roles in this partnership

Deltares will focus on remote sensing and machine learning algorithms in the field of water and the subsoil. WRI’s role in the project is to work on front-end user requirements and use case development. WWF’s role is to be involved in stakeholder engagement and convening dialogue with local communities. Google.org is the philanthropic arm of Google. Their goal is to help solve some of humanity’s biggest challenges — combining funding, innovation, and technical expertise to support underserved communities and provide opportunity for everyone.

Product roadmap

Start - 2021

To stimulate access to water information, the Dutch research institute Deltares has – with its partners World Resources Institute (WRI) and World Wide Fund (WWF) – received financial support from Google.org for the development of the Global Water Watch platform, providing access to high-resolution, near-real-time, water information.
Development - 2022

A web-based platform is being developed as well as algorithms to monitor waterbodies such as reservoirs and rivers. Our goal is to provide near-real-time information for thousands of reservoirs and river locations globally. The platform is being developed to provide access to the data. Algorithms and data are published in scientific journals and as open-source products.
Live - 2023

Global Water Watch provides open access to water information for thousands of reservoirs and river locations globally, updated regularly. Tools to analyze data at different spatiotemporal scales (administrative and hydrological), as well as open API to access data, are online, benefiting NGOs, researchers, journalists, and industry.