Water for people.pdf - WHO Thailand Digital Repository

S I G N I N G P R O G R E S S : I N D I C A T O R S M A R K T H E W A Y / 5 1showing global station holdings from the WMO Global Runoff DataCentre (GRDC) and earlier UNESCO hydrologic data banks amplydemonstrates the difficulty at hand. Declines can be found all overthe world, even in otherwise well-monitored countries such as theUnited States and Canada. Marked declines are most dramatic in thedeveloping world. Insofar as these regions are, by their very nature,subject to the direct and immediate effects of rapid anthropogenicchange, it is of great concern that the infrastructure to adequatelymonitor water resources is substantially lacking. A major effort will berequired to rehabilitate these atrophied monitoring systems. Without asustained international commitment to baseline monitoring, WWAP’sindicator development will suffer a major setback.Several factors contribute to the loss of hydrologic reporting (AdHoc Group on Global Water Data Sets, 2001; NRC, 1999; Kanciruk,1997). Data collection is now highly project-oriented, yielding poorlyintegrated time series of short duration, restricted spatial coverage,and limited availability. In addition, there has been a legal assault onthe open access to basic hydrometeorological data sets, aided in largemeasure by commercialization and fears surrounding the piracy ofintellectual property. Delays in data reduction and release (up toseveral years in some places) are also prevalent.Ironically, global analysis of hydraulic engineering is limited bya shortage of water data. Existing dam registries give noinformation on river discharge, either into or out of impoundments.The registries also fail to give complete information on storagevolumes and area. Relationships linking water level to surface areaand volume are not supplied, yet such information is essential forcomputing accurate impoundment residence times and in predictinghydrograph distortion. The volume of groundwater seepage loss isalso not documented, even for the largest reservoirs, and thehydrology of millions of farm ponds and rice paddies is, at best,educated guesswork.Information based on human impacts and stewardshipA critical requirement for water resource assessment across all scalesincludes a broad set of socio-economic variables to help quantify theutilization of water. The conjunction of these variables can producetwo fundamental quantities, that is, the rate of water withdrawaland/or consumption which can then be compared to water supply.This comparison produces the important indicator of relative wateruse, which is a measure of the capacity of the water resourcesystem to provide services to a community of local and regionalusers. However, the situations are not that simple to observe. Ethnoengineeringsolutions to water conveyance in the Gilgit area ofPakistan and in arid Egypt have proved common understanding ofhydraulics to be wrong. Similarly, while the total contribution ofpeople’s participation may have been guessed at and accounted for,calculating losses due to declining sources of traditional wisdom havenever been attempted. Such issues are important and need to becaptured in indicators, and were visible even in the pilot-case-studycountries where the national governments worked with the WWAPsecretariat to produce reports.These are some of the problems that WWAP has had to confront.There has been a steady realization that these challenges must beexamined as part of an integrated set of problems, where everythingis linked to everything else (though some links are of greaterstrategic importance than others). While the combination of DPSIRand policy-driven log frames (upon endorsement of lead UNagencies) can structure the desired indicators, this process must belooked upon as switching on the engine before putting the car ingear and placing one’s foot on the pedals. There is a whole chain ofrequired actions: identification and development of global water datasets, in-country capacity-building and technology transfer, statisticalanalysis, modelling, data interpretation, comparative trend analysis,and rapid data dissemination. Although in this report a large numberof indicators have been presented, the longer-term aim of theWWDR is to present most indicators in a geospatial format.Limitations, Caveats andDiscussion PointsThe previous section introduced the approach adopted in developingindicators both used and proposed through the WWDR process. Inthis section, some of their major limitations are highlighted.The issue of the right scaleScale is an important aspect in indicator development and use. Thisparagraph discusses four issues of scale. Firstly, indicators are oftentargeted to a certain spatial scale. As the information needs maydiffer at local, regional and global levels, indicators developed for acertain spatial scale may not be useful for another. For instance,data for an indicator at a high spatial level cannot always beobtained by aggregating the data of a lower spatial level. Thishampers the calculation of indicator values on the global level. Forexample, the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP)publicizes indicator values on water supply and sanitation at aglobal scale as the percentage of people with access to improveddrinking water resources and access to improved sanitation facilities(see table 3.5 for a selection of countries). The aim of the indicatoris to compare water supply and sanitation over the world. Theinformation need at the regional level, however, will be different; atthat scale the distribution of access over the regions or the type oftechnology in a certain region are more interesting factors. Theregional data can only be aggregated to a national indicator value ifthe indicators and data collection are the same between the