EXPERTS' WORKSHOP

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IMPROVING THE KNOWLEDGE OF WATER RESOURCES AND USES FOR SUSTAINABLE MANAGEMENT

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WORKING PAPER

CURRENT SITUATION

1. Inland freshwater resources are scarce. They are irregularly distributed over the years and greatly vary over the seasons. They are unequally shared between the continents and between countries, or even between the regions of a country.

2. Human activities have greater and greater impacts and some developments, excessive withdrawals or polluting discharges cause a change in the natural regime of watercourses, the degradation of resources quality and the disruption of ecosystems.

3. Water consumption has been multiplied worldwide by a factor close to 7 since the beginning of the century and has doubled during the last 20 years. This increase is going-on, although consumption seems to be at a standstill, or even decreases for some uses in certain industrialized countries.

4. Under such conditions, a thorough knowledge of water resources, of their different uses and evolution, and of the linkages with the surrounding environment, that is relevant and easy to access at the different levels where it is of use, is a prerequisite to a better integrated and sustainable management to meet the challenges of next century.

However,

- I.1  THIS KNOWLEDGE OF RESOURCES AND USES REMAINS INSUFFICIENT

• I.1.1 - These data only exist in an incomplete or fragmentary form, depending on the country

5. Although these data are most often very incomplete, they do exist in various forms, and concern:

* meteorology, rainfall in particular,
* hydrology of watercourses, at least the flow rates or water levels of the main rivers and tributaries
* water level of large reservoirs,
* groundwater levels ...

6. On the contrary, data do not exist, or are not easily available, as regards:

* water quality of rivers and aquifers or of the supplied drinking water,
* withdrawals, net consumption, use efficiency,
* polluting discharges of all kinds and origins,
* biology or eutrophication of ecosystems,
* transfers between parts of the natural environment (rivers, watersheds, sediments, groundwater, wetlands...), either concerning flow rates or pollution,
* land use in catchment areas with its correlation with water regime ...
* sediment transport, etc ...

7. Few data are also available on works, networks and equipment, on investments or costs, and on the water price that may be used and usually on water socio-econmy.

 I.1.2 - Information is dispersed and heterogeneous

8. * dispersed, because data, when they do exist, are usually distributed among several managing organizations with responsibilities that are sometimes badly defined.

9. The case is more complex when transboundary rivers and aquifers are concerned, because, when international agreements are lacking, each riparian country only gathers part of the information in its proper form that is relevant to its territory.

10. * Heterogeneous, because, most of the time, each data producer and data bank manager has developed his system, in a conventional manner that is usually efficient, according to his own logic, to his proper means and needs, without a sufficient dialogue either with the other complementary information systems or with the different possible users of data.

I.1.3 - Information is not relevant enough as regards:

a) continuity and duration of observations

11. Continuous and long chronological series of observations made on the same site are not always available. They would enable the assessment of resources during time periods to meet their management requirements, as well as the foreknowledge and forecast of extreme situations of drought or flood and their risk of occurring.

12. It is the same with regard to water and discharge quality when monitored and thus its variability in time as well as the frequency and probability of accidental occurrences are rarely known.

b) reliability

13. The precision with which the values are measured, must be sufficient to achieve objectives of knowledge and management. But this is usually far from being true, because of a number of instrumental, hydraulic or geological reasons or still due to the frequent insufficiency of the operators’ professional qualification or the lack of procedures for quality control.

c) representativeness of measurement and sampling sites

14. The siting and networking of stations and the frequency and nature of measurement and analysis must be organized according to the facts to be observed and to information needs.

15. Generally speaking, samplings must be made carefully at very short intervals all the more so that water availability is low compared to the needs, withdrawals and discharges are larger or denser or that particular hazards do exist.

d)  nature of monitored parameters

16. The choice of the parameters to be analyzed in order to describe surface and groundwater quality and characterize discharges obviously also depends on their nature, the sensitivity of the receiving media or on the uses to be met.

I.1.4 - there are still too few multi-purpose " integrated information systems "

17. Such systems ensure consistency in all the steps necessary for:

- field measurements and samplings,
- analyses in laboratories,
- the control of data quality,
- real-time or delayed transmission,
- the setting-up of data banks,
- data management,
- design and elaboration of products and enhancing application programmes,
- dissemination to the various users of the elaborated information in the appropriate form.

 

 

I.2 - THE TOOLS FOR ASSISTANCE TO DECISION-MAKING REMAIN INSUFFICIENTLY DEVELOPED

I.2.1 - The concepts used remain unclear and of little operational value

In a generalized practice, the assessment of resources, uses or discharges, is reduced to the summing up of raw data on flow rates, volumes, total rainfall or on the quantity of polluting substances.

19. Statistics on resources or consumption established with average figures do not reflect seasonal or inter-annual variations, and the global estimates assessed on usual territories (continent or country) do not take into account the more or less lucky spatial distribution of the resources, activities that consume water or the concentration of populations and often rely on summary extrapolations, etc.

20. Some indispensable concepts are not yet currently included in approaches, such as that of " regular resources ", whose availability would be ensured with a high inter-annual frequency, or that of " usable resources " that would take into account the technological difficulties encountered for mobilization and treatment, or their financial cost that prevent their effective use, or still environmental impacts, such as the necessity of replenishing the low flow of watercourses.

21. One of the causes of the non-intensification of rain-fed cultivation is the lack of forecasting tools that enable the foreseeing and management of investments in inputs, or the optimization of small complementary irrigation and the fact that traditional practices such as flood spreading are not well used in arid countries.

22. We are objectively unable to assess the possible consequences of the greenhouse effect on the water regime or on the desertification process.

23. Generally speaking, in spite of these drawbacks, a significant effort has been made during the last decades to acquire a better knowledge of the hydrometeorological cycle mechanisms. This knowledge seems less advanced and elaborated regarding quality and the mechanisms that govern water demand, pollution and the changes in the related environment.

24. Few figures on consumption exist and most of the users themselves do not know either the quantities they withdraw or those they really discharge. The notion of use efficiency remains to be truly developed.

25. There is usually a confusion between the figures given on withdrawals of raw water and effective net consumption, due to discharges and returns to the natural environment.

26. This is the case of the overall assessment of polluting discharges and above all of the efficiency of wastewater treatment systems, and of all that concern the determination of summary indexes of water and environmental quality whose approach is far from effective.

27. It is also the case of the emerging concepts of the patrimonial value of water and the balance of ecosystems although they have progressed in people’s mind.

28. The observations necessary for assessing all kinds of impacts of large projects are nowadays only used in research projects and the aggregating effect of small developments is not well assessed.

29. Some uses are also characterized by very small withdrawals in quantity but may be associated with very concentrated toxic discharges that degrade the quality of huge water volumes downstream and the natural environment, and prevent some uses. The measurement of these discharges, the methods used to evaluate their short and especially long-term effects, the study of their behaviour (aggregation on sediments, pollutant release, etc...) are only beginning.

30. Finally, a large part of the socioeconomic approach to water uses is not developed due to lack of relevant indicators or merely of available data.

I.2.2 - The elaboration of modern products for data development is only beginning

31. Indeed, if the information is to be useful, it must not remain in the form of raw data, but be retrieved in the form of easy-to-understand data which can be handled by all the different categories of users,

32. It must be organized according to the numerous and diverse requirements, whether it be for the study of " white books ", master plans for water management and development, for action programmes, budgetary simulations or the basis for water charges, for delivering administrative authorizations or studying projects, for regulation of public works, warning systems or even for evaluating the results of implemented policies and monitoring the changes in the state of the environment (...), finally for informing the general public...

33. All these different needs require the elaboration of adapted " development products ", while printed or typed (or even hand written) directories are only available most of the time, referring to columns of figures of operating data that are extremely uneasy to handle and entirely unusable, especially by non professional users.

34. Information retrieval in the form of curves, diagrams or maps that display changes, ratios of orders of magnitude or the geographic location of the described phenomena is not yet systematically organized.

35. The indispensable computerization of departments is still in an embryonic state and software for modern data management, modelling and retrieval are not sufficiently disseminated.

36. Data collection, but above all data centralization and storage are often carried out by research organizations that are not necessarily directly involved in water management activities or facility operation, and thus, due to this dichotomy in tasks, have not necessarily an adapted vision of the " products " for data development that should be available to the different categories of possible users.

37. Using available modern means, " multi-purpose integrated information systems " can enable the organization, at all useful levels, of warning systems, the optimal management of facilities or modelling for the simulation, in various scenarios, of qualitative and quantitative changes in diverse parameters useful for decision-making: we have to note that, although such systems do exist, their generalized utilization is still a long time ahead.

38. The work regarding the operational forecasting of resources and demands, as well as the use of prospective approaches remain punctual.

 I.2.3. - data management is not yet sufficiently developed

39. Although very important tasks have been undertaken, especially by the United Nations Agencies or by the European Union, the standardization of methodologies at national, regional and even international level, is not yet really possible and the practices of the different data producers and database managers remain highly heterogeneous.

40. Moreover, it is indispensable to tend towards:

• dictionaries that precisely describe the information to be provided for each parameter,
• general nomenclatures,
• standardized geographic and mapping references,
• standard formats for the exchange of computerized data,
• catalogues of sources, etc...

all the more so that several authorities share the tasks of managing a common resource or that the administrative organization is more deconcentrated or decentralized at many geographical levels, especially in the countries with a very large territory.

41. The definition of common standards for data producers and database managers remains to be done.

42. Multiple other examples could be given to illustrate this considerable lack of homogeneity in the information related to water demands or discharges, with the result that it is difficult to make analyses of the resource-demand ratio on the field, on the scale of a river basin or a country and can hardly be comparable between different countries

 I.3 - information is neither easily accessible nor usable:

43. Besides the above-mentioned problems of dispersion and quality, we should be aware that data, when they exist, are usually of very difficult access.

44. This access notion has become essential in a very short time within the context of a real and deep revolution in communications and information dissemination worldwide.

45. If we refer to the conclusions of recent evaluations of collection systems, it has been usually noted that delays between collection in the field and primary data processing could reach several months and even several years sometimes, while this delay, according to present techniques, should be a few days at the most.

46. When these data exist, they are often coded in " owner " formats, thus preventing simple exchanges with the other information systems and the users.

47. The user must usually move about to get these data as there is rarely a possibility of remote access to a catalogue of available information, and the retrieval of data according to a particular request of the user, whenever possible, is not user-friendly and requires the action of the computer scientist who manages the data bases.

48. Many countries have not yet a high speed connection to the internet network, and when it is true, the administrations concerned are not always connected to an access server, or even merely computerized.

49. The staff capabilities and the available computer equipment are frequently too limited or inoperative, when not entirely lacking: a huge effort is necessary to invest in appropriate equipment and, above all, in the professional training of all categories of personnel.

50. It is of particular significance that information be provided in real or differed time, depending on the case, in forms that are usable in every kind of tasks necessary for water management at all necessary action levels:

- local departments or private users (irrigation users, industrialists ...),
- river basins,
- governmental, national or federal administrations,
- possible international institutions.

Recent progresses in the technology related to shared data bases and communications enable the design of information systems that do not require a spatial concentration of data at a particular site. However, standardization procedures must be defined and applied and this necessarily implies the coordination of methods, training and equipment.

51. Meteorological forecasts that are widely disseminated in almost all countries of the earth by way of radio, TV or newspapers, should comprise a more specific and explicit component for precipitation forecast, especially in areas where rainfall remains a determining factor for agriculture or stock breeding. In most regions, this implies that this forecasting capacity be significantly improved and thus requires progress in the observation of climate phenomena (monitoring networks on the ground, satellites) and in the knowledge of the circulation of air masses (progress in meteorological sciences) and in the organization of warning services for farmers.

52. It is also clear that, due to the " sensitive " character of some information regarding either resource localization or quantity, or the level of pollution or environmental degradation, " public " access to reliable data is not always facilitated.

 I.4 - THE MEANS NECESSARY FOR GATHERING INFORMATION ARE USUALLY INSUFFICIENT

53. Information gathering, that requires a consistent organization of monitoring networks, laboratories for analyses, data transmission and their checking and control, management of data banks, their access mode and their " products ", implies that investment and operation means are available to guarantee efficiency and the lasting operation of an integrated information system whose optimizing must be ensured, in order to obtain all the relevant information at minimum cost, limiting this however, to the strict necessary.

54. It should be reminded in particular that, although investment costs for obtaining appropriate information (stations, laboratories, tele-transmission, computerization ...) are high, the qualification of intervening experts (training) and management and operating costs are, by far, the highest and recurring items of expenditure on the medium and long-term. France for example must devote more than FF 200 million per year to the operation of its water information system, shared between the various operators that are involved: it is a particularly heavy budget.

55. From this viewpoint, new technologies can never be substituted to a sound organization, with adequate means and competent multidisciplinary teams in particular. Information systems only operate when skilled operators are in charge; satellite links, models, automatic analyzers, etc ... are only used to facilitate the tasks of the services not to replace them...

56. It would thus seem logical to think that data collection and management have been reinforced, as the concerns regarding the water sector have been increasing for many years. In fact, this is not usually the case, especially in developing countries. Comprehensive assessments at continental level, such as the "Assessment of water resources in Sub-Saharan Africa" programme, carried out under the aegis of international organizations and of several international and bilateral donors, have concluded that a very significant degradation occurred in the quality and quantity of collected data since the beginning of the 1980s.

57. To be more precise, the activity of many agencies in charge of collecting these data, that almost always belong to the public sector, shows a serrated profile where lucky periods that correspond to international or bilateral assistance programmes, alternate with periods of great difficulty most often related to the few sustainable operating means.

I.5 - PROMISING INITIATIVES HAVE BEEN RECENTLY LAUNCHED

58. The initiative inspired by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), " whycos " (World HYdrological Cycle Observing System) should be mentioned here. This system aims to significantly improve the precision and continuity of field measurements by possibly resorting to advanced technologies and whose final objective is the setting-up of regional data bases. Some regional whycos programmes are on-going or in the qualification phase (The Mediterranean, Southern Africa, Western and Central Africa, Equatorial Africa, the Caribbean, etc.).

59. The "FRIEND" programme (Flow Regimes from International Experimental and Network Data), organized within the UNESCO International Hydrological Programme (IHP), deals with the main topics related to hydrological regimes of rivers using a regional methodology: data bases, inputs, low water flow, floods, heavy rainfall, but also physical processes: run-off, trends, hydrology of integrated water management.

60. A working group common to UNESCO and WMO has also been created within the framework of this UNESCO International Hydrological Programme (IHP) to deal with the management of hydrological data circulation.

61. The Global Environment Monitoring System, GEMS, "Waters" programme, implemented under the aegis of UNEP and in liaison with WHO, can also be cited.

62. The FAO AQUASTAT programme is a remarkable initiative, due to its relevance on national scales and its capacity to provide more global estimates on the agricultural uses of water

63. Among the regional projects of Inter-State collaboration for the setting-up of new information systems, " EMWIS " (Euro-Mediterranean Water Information System) must be mentioned, the implementation of which was decided during the Conference that gathered, in Naples (Italy) on last 9 and 10 December, the water managers of the 27 countries, signatories of the Barcelona Convention, and the European Commission.

64. The work that has been carried out for three years within the " Inland Freshwater " Topic Centre  of the European Environmental Agency, has also enable the definition of the conditions necessary for the creation of a future European Water Network (EUROWATERNET), that will gather in time the information necessary for making an inventory of the state of the environment in this sector in the fifteen member-States of the European Union, Norway and the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, new candidates to becoming members of the community.

65. A research has also been carried out, with the support of the DGXII European programme TEDIS, on the computerized exchange of water data between the largest operators of the sector.

66. In France, for instance, the RNDE (National Water Data Network), that relies on SANDRE (National Data Reference Centre for Water) has enabled the creation of an inter-bank system for the general exchange of data, called the BNDE (National Water Data Base) that inter-relates, either at the national level or that of the 6 river basins, the dozen specialized data banks that already existed.

67. Other integrating projects of this kind already exist, or are under study, at federal or national levels, such as, for example, in Brazil, with the setting up of a National Data System for Water Resources, or at the level of large river basins, such as, in Poland, the system (observatory) for monitoring the water quality of the Vistula River and its tributary, the Bug River that is common with Bielarus and Ukraine, or the system for monitoring the environment in the Senegal River valley, shared by Mauritania, Senegal and Mali, etc...

68. Projects for " Basin Observatories " (monitoring systems) are also under study or planned in India (Sabarmati River), in Mexico (PROMMA) or in Turkey (the Aegean rivers - Izmir Bay), for instance...

69. Standardized data exchanges have also been organized for a long time in International Commissions, set up for the Protection of Geneva Lake (French-Swiss CIPEL) or of the waters of the Rhine, Meuse and Scheldt (Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands,) in particular...

- ANNEX 1 -

There could be more than 1,300 million km³ of water on our planet, ... 97 % of which is salt water. The stocks of freshwater are estimated at 35 million km³. These are distributed as follows (Table 1) according to their storage :

Table 1 : distribution of freshwater stocks on earth ().

These figures show without any ambiguity that the "visible" liquid water volumes are a small part of the stocks, and that the main part of freshwater is stored in the form of ice on the inland masses of Antarctica and Greenland. Groundwater is the second largest storage. The average water supply in river beds is small, while water in all lakes and marshes only represents 0.3% of the total volume.

__________

() : Shiklomanov, I.A. (ed.), 1996. Assessment of water resources and availability throughout the world. State Hydrological Institute. St. Petersburg. Technical document appended to the "Comprehensive assessment of the planet’s freshwater". Report of the Secretary General at the fifth session of the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development. New York, April 1997, 64 pp.

 

The distribution of these flows per continent (Table 2) shows that a wide hydrological diversity exists: as regards flow volumes, Asia is the first producer of freshwater for the oceans, South America follows (Column 2). On the other hand, if these volumes are taken in mm equivalent and distributed on each continent (Column 4), it is then noted that South America, with a yearly flow of 661 mm, is hydrologically twice as active as Asia (332 mm). This is explained by the huge hydrological system of the Amazon River that alone accounts for about 7,000 km³, that is 15 % of the global flow and by the developed endorheic Asia.

Table 2 : Contribution of the continents to freshwater flows (²)

() : Shiklomanov I. (1993) World Freshwater Resources. In "Water in Crisis", P. Gleick ed., Chapter. 2, pp 1-24, Oxford University Press.

 

 

- ANNEX 2 -

Natural and renewable freshwater resources worldwide (average flows) distributed by geopolitical regions (group of countries).

Figures updated in priority with the most recent national assessments and completed with international compilations (especially Shiklomanov, UNESCO, 1996 and FAO 1995,1997). They are slightly superior to those previously published.

* a part of which may be shared by several countries of the group and a part can be provided to a neighbouring country.