Hydrological Observation Data and Services for Good Governance

While existing water trends paint a rather sobering picture for the future, there are reasons for optimism: increasing awareness overall of the challenges, and eagerness to find new approaches to water governance that ensure this vital resource is managed wisely and responsibly to achieve the sustainable development goals SDGs especially the #Water #SDG.

One of the critical issues is the importance of hydrological data to water resources management and access to reliable and timely hydrological information.

"“We cannot manage what we haven’t measured” and “data only reach their true value once they are used”.

Today, the world water data fall far short of the fundamental goal of being complete, accessible and usable, that is readily available at relevant spatial and temporal resolutions and are useful for making the decision at hand.

Due to the multi- and interdisciplinary challenges of water resources management, there is a need for greater integration of water data from different sources and engaging multi stockholders under the principles of integrated water resources management (IWRM) at different spatial scales from local to regional to global. We have to address data gaps, which take variety of forms (e.g. availability, accessibility and usability) and need to be filled in distinct ways. Moreover, Basing the hydrological data and services based on data sharing and stakeholders engagement requires robust infrastructure, good governance, and sustainable funding and long term investment with commitment to communication with end user' needs.

Data sharing "an open mind on open data" is critical for the success of good governance and help optimize institution’s performance and lead to win-win improvements across the supply chain. It is important to address the barriers for data sharing in terms of legal restrictions or concerns around intellectual property, privacy or potential liability .Innovation and transfer technology are vital elements of this effort but Innovation does not happen in vacuum, It requires from various stakeholders to come together to be more than a sum of their parts.

Open data can be of significant benefits to drive good governance and make government and public utilities more transparent, accountable, and efficient. Open data can open the way to citizen empowerment. However, best practices in open data involve more than just making existing data more readily available. Without adequate processing capacity or decision support systems, many individuals and institutions may not have the capacity to use large volumes of data effectively and make use of the hydrological services. Consequently, there is a desperate need to consider access and usability of data for decision making, including the capacities of the stakeholders to make use of large volumes of data.

“We Need More Data to achieve the water SDG!”

Innovations and synergies across data ecosystems

Identifying the most innovative solutions to improve the availability and use of hydrological data; It is important to form alliances incl. private sector, technical agencies, politicians, civil society. Stakeholders engagement (from governments at different levels, to end users, regulators, civil society and donors) who are directly or indirectly affected by water data and water governance, as well as those who may have interests in it and/or the ability to influence its outcome, either positively or negatively. Merging new data sources with traditional ones requires the modernization of data governance and quality frameworks to ensure the transparent mechanisms. Such mechanisms allow partners from the private sector, academia and civil society to contribute their data, expertise and technology to achieving the SDG6.

There is a clear need for bottom-up, inclusive approaches to the identification of the most pressing concerns of action. New technological development, data processing and analysis, and knowledge communications are providing new opportunities for citizen science based monitoring