Every year on 18 September, World Water Monitoring Day raises public awareness of the need to protect global water resources. Water monitoring is an essential key for this, providing stakeholders with the information they need to make well-founded decisions for a sustainable development of water resources.
GEMStat is one of the largest collections of global water monitoring data, focusing on water quality parameters. Since its beginnings it has grown continuously since its inception, reaching a current total of around 30 million measurements from over 20,000 stations in 90 countries, covering over 600 different water quality parameters. While GEMStat data goes back as far as to the beginning of the 20th century, major increases in data availability occurred in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as from 2010 to 2020.
However, despite the impressive amount of available data, there are still important regions of the world for which data availability in GEMStat is very limited. Over 75% of the data in GEMStat comes from two handful of countries, while little data is available from West Asia and large parts of Africa and the Asia-Pacific region.
This situation is also reflected in the reporting framework for SDG indicator 6.3.2. Although a large number of member states reported on the indicator in the last data run in 2023 (120 countries), the number of stations that a country reported on by a country is highly related to its economic situation. The richest 25% of countries reported on over 75% of the total number of water bodies, whereas the poorest 25% of countries reported on only 3.5% of all water bodies.
This means that health and livelihoods in these countries are particularly at risk if water bodies are not monitored sufficiently to identify water quality degradation and allow mitigation measures to be taken.
GEMS/Water is involved in a number of capacity development activities to improve this situation. We are promoting the integration of citizen science monitoring into national monitoring programmes. During the last data collection for SDG indicator 6.3.2, case studies in Sierra Leone and Zambia clearly demonstrated that this approach can significantly increase a country’s data submission. Furthermore, in collaboration with the World Water Quality Alliance’s Earth Observation workstream, we are developing an indicator based on satellite data that represents a data submission for SDG indicator 6.3.2.
In addition to extending existing monitoring programmes, issues with data management were identified as significant during the last data drive for SDG indicator 6.3.2. To address this issue, GEMS/Water has partnered with a consultant to develop a data management framework based on open-source solutions. Updates on this will be published on this website, once they become available.
