Water Monitoring: Mapping Existing Global Systems and Initiatives

Major water quality problems stem from sewage pollution, the intensive agricultural use of fertilizers and pesticides, industrial wastes, saltwater intrusion, and soil erosion. In calling for integrated water resource management, the World Summit on Sustainable Development emphasized the need to protect water, its quality, and ecosystem functions through improved assessment and greater understanding of the impacts of climate change.

• By nature, most of the global water databases and monitoring systems currently maintained by the various UN agencies and programs contain secondary data. In several cases, UN agencies and other institutions maintain information systems based uniquely on tertiary data already collected from international sources. Tweet
• Water-related targets of the Millennium Development Goals are adequately covered by the WHO-UNICEF JMP, which reports regularly on water supply and sanitation. Tweet
• GWP, UNDP, Japan Water Forum and UNEP-UCC regional initiatives have developed a capacity to monitor the adoption of integrated water resource management (IWRM) plans. The role of UN-Water in the Commission on Sustainable Development is to better interact with the United Nations Statistics Division in the definition of water-related indicators of sustainable development. Tweet
• Information on water quantity seems to be more widely available than water quality data, in terms of countries' coverage. Tweet
• Several major monitoring programs suffer from irregular updating, which affects their timely and regular reporting capacity. Some monitoring systems are not easily accessible and poorly described and therefore probably of little use for the international community. Data quality remains a major issue in assessing the reliability of monitoring systems. Tweet
• There is tremendous scope for better structuring of information among the different systems, with large potential benefits for the users of the information; while the amount of information available is impressive, key information is still missing to get full coverage of the water sector. Tweet
• Impressive progress has been made recently in the development of global spatial information through GIS. During the mapping exercise, it was observed that the most of the data used to compile indicators is collected at the national level and it seems that this tendency will be reinforced in the years to come. Tweet