Mapping the Links between Water, Poverty and Food Security. Report on the Water Indicators workshop held at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology

The use of indicators is perceived to have increasing importance in the water sector. This report outlines progress in the refinement of integrated approaches to indicator development addressed during a one-week workshop held in May 2005 at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) in Wallingford, UK. This was attended by representatives from a number of institutions with an interest in water indicators and particularly by those with an interest in their international and basin application. The workshop was initiated by the Global Water System Project (part of the Earth System Science Partnership), which has an interest in using indicators in its forthcoming Digital Water Atlas. In addition, the Challenge Programme for Water and Food is currently seeking solutions on how indicators can best be used in comparative river basin studies; it was considered useful to streamline the efforts of these two groups on indicator use. Having extensively reviewed the indicator literature, these two programmes have expressed interest in the structure of the Water Poverty Index (WPI), an holistic and integrated water index developed from research led by the CEH. As a result, it was decided to combine these initiatives at this workshop, with a view to generating an indicator more specifically targeted towards the linked issues of water, poverty and food security, as well as the need for basin-scale assessment. During the meeting, considerable discussion took place on the structure and use of integrated indices such as the WPI. Strengths and weaknesses of such indices were identified, and suggestions were made on how these could be addressed at the basin scale. With a focus on food and health in relation to water and poverty, a new set of indicator variables was identified after several periods of intense discussion in breakout groups. Discussion also focused on the structure of such indices, and the use of a more complex matrix structure was considered. It was agreed that the output of the indicator component of this workshop will remain as an index; in order to differentiate it from the WPI, it will be referred to as the “Water Wealth Index”(WWI) because the term “poverty” is often considered to be pejorative. The workshop also provided an excellent opportunity to facilitate the testing of the Global-RIMS web-based integrated monitoring tool. This has been developed by the University of New Hampshire and consolidates some 130 global data sets. The tool facilitates the calculation of integrated queries, and generates values that can be used in a variety of ways. The facility for mapping the outputs provides users with useful visualization tools; the meeting provided a pilot testing ground for its application in a variety of major river basins throughout the world. While there is much further work to be done on both of these tools, much progress has been made in addressing the challenges associated with data assimilation, data integration, up and down scaling, data representation and indicator structures. It is hoped that the initiative described in this report will be regarded as progress in this debate, and will serve to highlight priority areas for future work. It is important, however, that the contents of this report are viewed as the preliminary result of work in progress, and with more time, these results will become much more complete and robust.