ICWRGC is involved in various research and development projects.
We see ourselves as an interface between science, practice-oriented interest groups and decision-makers.
The current key research activities on water resources management include climate change and adaptation, water quality and sediment dynamics as well as the Water-Energy-Food nexus.
This is our active contribution to achieving the following sustainable development goals of the Agenda 2030: Clean Water and Sanitation, Affordable and Clean Energy, Zero Hunger, Sustainable Consumption and Production, Climate Action, Life below water and Life on land. Several examples of ongoing research pro-jects and co-operations will be briefly presented below.
The sustainability goals and the
“Water-Energy-Food“ nexus The 17 SDGs include 169 targets, whose implementation is to be mon-itored by indicators. Due to a lack of data, imprecise definitions and unforeseen compromises between individual sectors, checking the goal achievement is a major challenge.
Within the scope of the „Sustainable Water Future Programme“, we have been supporting the management of the core group „The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): From modelling SDG indicators to syner-gies and trade-offs in the Water-En-ergy-Food Nexus“ since June 2016.
This group investigates how global hydrology, vegetation, land surface, land use and mathematical models can contribute to monitoring and fore-casting progress in implementing the sustainability goals.
Moreover, we have developed a meth-odology to analyse the SDGs Zero Hunger, Clean Water and Sanitation and Affordable and Clean Energy (Fader et al. 2018). The study re-vealed that achieving the water targets will constantly facilitate the imple-mentation of other targets. While the results still require adaptation to a specific site or a country, they do provide a better understanding of the interactions between the targets.
Use of climate projection calcula-tions for hydrological risk assess-ment
Projection calculations on climate change and its impacts vary largely.
Therefore, using multi-model-en-sembles is state of research, in order to quantify potential future changes of variables that are relevant for the assessment of climate risks.
The objective of the EU-financed third-party funded project CO-MICC (“CO-development of Methods to utilize uncertain multi-model based Information on freshwater-related hazards of Climate Change”) is to develop methods for providing and using multi-model-ensemble data on freshwater-related hazards of climate change. These are required to assess risks and adaptive measures at various spatial scales including the underlying model uncertainties. In the recent two years, interviews with relevant interest groups were conducted in the focus regions (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and the Ebro basin in Spain). This al-lowed gaining experience on relevant hydrological indicators as well as for
http://www.bmz.de/de/themen/2030_agenda/index.html http://water-future.org/people/sdg-assessment-core-group/
representing information and uncer-tainties. The results shall be used for developing a knowledge and data plat-form as well as recommendations for action that will be freely accessible for all interested parties. The portal is operated by ICWRGC and hosted by BfG. The project under the auspices of Goethe University Frankfurt has a term of two years from 2018 – 2020 and is promoted by the “European Research Area for Climate Services”.
http://www.co-micc.eu
Data
Since April 2014, the GEMS/Water Data Centre has been located at the ICWRGC – with GEMS being short for Global Environmental Monitor-ing System. Under the auspices of the United Nations Environmental Programme it collects and evaluates water quality data from freshwater bodies worldwide. In 2017, the World Meteorological Organisation also entrusted us with the mandate to coor-dinate and develop the Global Terres-trial Network – Hydrology (GTN-H).
Both activities supply another vital contribution to the implementation of the sustainable development goals:
Within the scope of GEMS/Water, we are actively involved in the develop-ment of the sustainable developdevelop-ment goals for the quality of inland waters.
Moreover, owing to our coordination of GTN-H, we support the implemen-tation of the goals Clean Water and Sanitation, Climate Action and Life on Land.
In close cooperation with its partner centres, the “Global Programme
Coor-dination Unit” in Nairobi, Kenya and the “Capacity Development Centre“
in Cork, Ireland, the GEMS/Water data centre published the results of the first reporting period 2015–2018 in March 2018. The report included contributions by 52 member states.
https://www.sdg6monitoring.org/
indicators/target-63/indicators632/
The GEMS/Water Data Centre As a German contribution, the GEMS/
Water Data Centre coordinates the data-related activities of the “GEMS/
Water Programme”. This work is implemented on behalf of the Federal Ministry for the Environment and no-tably includes the acquisition of water quality data from the UN member states and the operation of the global water quality database GEMStat. This work supports the member states in the fields of management, evaluation and reporting of water quality meas-uring data of inland water bodies.
The data is supplied by the states and their specialist institutions. The resulting data products can be used i.a. for status assessments, political decision-making processes, research purposes or training programmes. The database currently includes more than 4 million entries for rivers, lakes, wet-lands and groundwater systems from 75 countries and approx. 4,000 sta-tions (Fig. 24). Overall, the data cover a time span between 1965 and 2017 as well as more than 250 water quality parameters. They can be retrieved via a specially designed data portal.
A redesigned data portal has been available since February 2019. Be-sides visualisations of stations and measured data, it allows direct data
download. Along with the other online components, the new portal was officially introduced during the 4th United Nations Environment Assem-bly in Nairobi, Kenya in March 2019.
All data products may be accessed online via the Homepage.
www.gemstat.org
The Global Terrestrial Network Hydrology (GTN-H)
Founded in 2001 and commissioned by WMO, GTN-H has been coor-dinated by us since 2017. GTN-H is a network of twelve global data centres, engaging in the quality-as-sured collection, notably of locally measured data, for various important
water variables and the provision of joint products. Especially worth mentioning is the close cooperation of the world data centres operated by Germany, namely “Global Pre-cipitation Climatology Centre” (run by Deutscher Wetterdienst), “Global Runoff Data Centre” (operated by BfG), and GEMS/Water Data Cen-tre (GEMStat, run by ICWRGC and BfG). GTN-H offers first-class access to data and information, i.a. on runoff, lakes and reservoirs, precipitation, groundwater, soil moisture and water quality or the content of hydrogen and oxygen isotopes in rivers and precip-itation.
www.GTN-H.info
Fig. 24: Global overview of GEMStat types of stations.
Reference:
Fader, M., C. cranmer, R. lawFord, J.
engel-cox (2018): Toward an Under-standing of Synergies and Trade-Offs between Water, Energy, and Food SDG Targets. Front. Environ.
Sci., 12 November 2018. https://doi.
org/10.3389/fenvs.2018.00112
Further information:
www.waterandchange.org
Contact:
Harald Köthe (koethe@bafg.de) Dr. Stephan Dietrich (dietrich@bafg.de)