The monitoring of water is critical for planning and policy, especially under climate and socio-economic change. Detailed information on the spatial distribution, quantity and variability of human and natural components of the hydrologic system is needed for informed decision making around allocation and management of scarce water resources, both at the local level – such as farm-level irrigation scheduling – and for crafting basin-to-national-scale policies and long-term strategic planning. Monitoring of water demand and supply is therefore central to the TRANSCEND project’s aim of identifying, designing, and catalysing the adoption of Transformational Adaptation Policies (TAPs) to water scarcity.
Despite these needs, as described in Deliverable D4.1 (White Paper), gaps in basin-scale monitoring impede our ability to design and implement TAPs. Monitoring data gaps have serious implications for the sustainability and effectiveness of water management, constraining efforts to allocate available water resources between competing uses, limiting the ability to effectively identify and assess environmental impacts of policy changes, and reducing overall trust in water management planning. There is a pressing global need to develop affordable, transferable and accurate methods to aid in the collection of policy-ready water availability data.
In this deliverable, a set of research activities comprising the Monitoring Toolbox are described, as well as the decision-making process (including co-creation) that led to these research activities being selected. At the core of the Toolbox is the development of land use/land cover and irrigated area maps using Earth Observation (EO) data. EO data, combined with advanced data-driven modelling tools such as machine learning algorithms, provides a scalable and cost-effective solution to address gaps in agricultural land and water use monitoring that were identified as a common cross-cutting monitoring need across the majority of TRANSCEND’s living labs and are of broader importance globally in water-scarce river basins.
We outline the key features of the Toolbox, along with specific activities and timelines for a series of pilot applications planned in four of TRANSCEND’s living labs spanning three continents and six countries: Titicaca Lake, Desaguedero River, Lake Poopo system in Latin America (Bolivia and Peru); Jucar River basin in Spain; Mahanadi River basin in India; and the Tympaki River basin in Greece. We also further document processes for ensuring that the Toolbox and the data it produces are impactful, actionable, and sustainable beyond the end of TRANSCEND, both within the pilot labs and in river basins globally. These include stakeholder engagement and partnership in co-design, open-access code/tools, and synergetic knowledge exchange, both within and beyond the consortium. In doing so, the TRANSCEND Monitoring Toolbox will be a vital vehicle supporting the development of TAPs to water scarcity, climate change, and socio-economic development in agriculturally intensive river basins worldwide.