Relevance of Water Accounting Plus in the MENA region: A pragmatic analysis in light of the region’s challenges to sustainable water management

Water is the most vital resource on Earth, sustaining all life forms, and it is also the most threatened by climate change and anthropogenic activities. This situation is even more urgent in water-scarce regions like the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) due to water scarcity and increasing demands. Managing these water resources sustainability requires accurate information on water availability and utilization.

Water Accounting is the systematic acquisition, analysis, and communication of information relating to water stocks and fluxes in natural, disturbed, or heavily engineered environments (FAO, 2016). It helps decision-makers understand problems in river basins, identify their drivers, quantify water availability, form proper decisions, and monitor their results over time. Water Accounting Plus (WA+) utilizes open-access spatial data for the analyses, allowing visualizing spatial and temporal trends and patterns. While analyses tools are being refined and made accessible for all, it has not been fully adopted in the MENA, and its implementation is limited to one-off studies.

This paper explores the type of information used/ needed by decision-makers to address the most pertinent water problems in the MENA region through a focused literature review. This was contrasted by the information provided by WA+. Because water problems are context-specific, a more detailed analysis was done for Jordan using semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders.

The results show that the most used information for the assessments in the region is precipitation, river discharge, surface and groundwater stocks at a monthly time scale. However, other aspects such as actual water consumption and losses are essential but not readily available and are therefore estimated using many assumptions. The WA+ framework, by utilizing spatial and temporal RS-based information, can support a systematic quantification of water consumption and losses and helps fill such information gaps. However, supporting decision-making requires more, from assessing the impact of climate change to informing proper water management decisions. Therefore, it is critical to underpin WA+ with scientifically sound hydrological models that can simulate future water fluxes and stocks and test different management interventions using scenario analysis.