FAO’s WaPOR database to monitor water productivity wins award
WaPOR has been named a Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Award winner by the Group on Earth Observation, a partnership of more than 100 national governments and more than 100 organizations. WaPOR is a repository of data hosted by the Food and Agriculture Organization, which can be used to remotely monitor land and water productivity,
Until recently, WaPOR's data had been used to monitor the efficiency of water use in agriculture across Africa and the Near East only. It became available in 2017 - with data collected from 2009 retrospectively. In early October 2023, the FAO WaPOR database was scaled up to cover the whole world. Associate Professor of Water Resources Management Marloes Mul says, "It's great that this data is now available globally and it can be used from farmers' field scale to river basins all over the world."
"It's great that this data is now available globally and it can be used from farmers' field scale to river basins all over the world."
WaPOR uses open source data in near real time to collect various data sets at multiple scales. The system enables countries to collate data on agricultural and water efficiency, as required by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Measuring water efficiency makes it possible to use water better. It helps users to harvest more crop per drop, thereby contributing to SDG targets on water use efficiency (SDG6) on water and sanitation for all, and on ending hunger (SDG2).
Open source tools and training
As main implementing partner of WaPOR, IHE Delft provided input to finetune the calibration and validation of data during the first phase of implementation. In the subsequent phases, the Institute developed various valuable resources for specific areas of water productivity analysis - making WaPOR data accessible to farmers, irrigation managers, river basin organisations and governmental agencies. This includes a free open online course, available in English, Arabic and French, in which participants learn how use the WaPOR database. This successful outreach approach has seen almost 3000 students enrol from across the globe. And the development of new materials is ongoing, with more and more open course ware becoming available all the time.
WaPOR Hackathons
IHE Delft continues to work on applications for aggregating WaPOR data, such as WaPOR4Awp: Agricultural Water Productivity Dashboard. However, to attract move creative collaboration, IHE Delft also organizes WaPOR Hackathons. The event brings together cross-disciplinary experts to develop new ideas, which increase the possibilities of using WaPOR data for different applications. This year’s hackathon attracted 168 participants from 38 countries.
WaPOR was developed by FAO in collaboration with IHE Delft and the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) with financial support from the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The GEO SDG Awards will be presented 8 November 2023 during GEO Week in South Africa. Previous winners include the Netherlands Space Office’s Geodata for Agriculture and Water (G4AW) programme and AI-powered satellite imagery analytics system EOS Data Analytics.