Effective, sustainable, and equitable basin-scale water management is predicated on monitoring of water use and availability. Yet, many river basins around the world lack intelligence or data about key natural and human components of the water cycle, such as agricultural abstractions or groundwater storage, and how these are evolving over time and space. As part of WP4 of TRANSCEND, a key goal is to identify and address systematic gaps in monitoring of water use and water availability across each of the project’s seven living labs. The goal is to build transferable monitoring tools that can support the design, evaluation, and implementation of transformational adaptation policies in these seven basins, and other catchments globally. Towards that goal, this report summarises the current status of water use and water availability monitoring in each of the seven TRANSCEND living labs, and identifies common monitoring gaps and deficiencies that should be addressed to support adaptation to water scarcity. This information was gathered through a survey distributed in October 2023 to living lab leads for each of TRANSCEND’s seven case study river basins, supplemented through bi-lateral dialogue with living lab lead organisations and desk research. Our analysis shows that monitoring status across the seven labs is heterogeneous, but there are a number of common monitoring and data gaps across multiple basins which are also consistent with global monitoring deficiencies and trends. For water availability, groundwater monitoring was significantly less well developed in comparison with surface water monitoring. Even those labs (e.g. Jucar) which already have extensive hydrogeological monitoring networks lack detailed information about spatial aquifer dynamics or responses to human pressures, while in other lab (e.g. Mahanadi, CMD) knowledge of groundwater storage dynamics is limited or insufficient despite the significant importance of this water resource base. Across all TRANSCEND’s living labs, agriculture is the main land use and water user in some or at least part of each basin. Monitoring of water abstractions and land use by agriculture is universally limited, often at aggregated spatially or for single snapshots in time that are insufficient to support policy design and implementation, and anecdotal evidence from local partners and wider experience suggests the prevalence of significant unregulated water abstractions. More broadly, we find little evidence of attempts in any labs to quantify or account for uncertainties in monitoring data, in particular when using regional or global secondary data products (e.g. gridded hydrometeorological data) to full in-situ data gaps. The information collated in this report will be used as the basis for prioritising and targeting monitoring tool development in WP4 of TRANSCEND, while also providing an important shared knowledge base of catchment conditions and data availability to support modelling and capacity development activities within TRANSCEND.
