The Water and Climate Coalition: Establishing a Globally Connected Water Resources Assessment System

Water is key to sustainable development and improving resilience to climate change yet, sixty percent of countries worldwide report declining water monitoring capabilities. This decline, combined with a growing information gap, hinders optimal use and planning of water resources.  

Water information is needed for effective and efficient water management and climate change adaptation. Currently, this information is fragmented, has large gaps and is partially inaccessible. We want to empower national water management by catalyzing international cooperation through trustful bilateral and multilateral water assessments and outlooks. We want to create a global system that is consistent, interconnected, and helps current and future generations to better understand how global hydrological cycles respond to a changing climate and anthropogenic factors. 

A fundamental arm of the Paris Agreement is the Global Stocktake: a component employed to monitor implementation and evaluate the collective progress made in achieving the agreed carbon goals. In conjunction with the climate stocktake, there is a need for a water resources assessment system that can feed local, regional and global hydrological data into modelling systems. This data can then support evaluations and inform decision processes – in other words, a water stocktake. 

An example of a water resources assessment system under the framework of the Water and Climate Coalition (water-climate-coalition.org) and its partners is the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Hydrological Status and Outlook System (HydroSOS). HydroSOS aims to cement itself as a chief constituent of this water stocktake – capable of providing actionable information of current and future water availability. HydroSOS intends to strengthen the capacity of National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHSs) to develop a system capable of assessing the status of surface and subsurface hydrological systems and predicting how they will change in the future. HydroSOS is the first global operational mechanism for integrating reliable and timely hydrological status assessments and outlooks that is consistent and comparable on a global scale in collaboration with producers and users of hydrological information.