The water portal: a decision support system for water governance

Abstract

The World Water Assessment Programme (WWAP) is UN-system wide programme involving all agencies and convention secretariats concerned with freshwater. It responds to 1998 call by UN Commission for sustainable development for UN system to undertake period assessments of the sustainable development, management, protection and use of fresh water resources. The commission requested that progress towards goals adopted in Agenda 21 be monitored and that a global picture of state of freshwater resources and potential problems be drawn. The WWAP has been recognized as flagship programme of newly created UN-Water. The main goals of programme are to assess state of world's freshwater resources, identify critical issues and problems, develop indicators, measure progress towards achieving sustainable use of water resources and help countries develop their own assessment capacity. One of main conclusions of first edition of World Water Development Report was that current world's water crisis is mainly crisis of water governance. To tackle this issue WWAP has initiated project called 'Decision Support System for Water Governance. This project is being developed through regional prototype named SAGA (Sistema de Apoyo la Gobernabilidad del Agua) that is located in Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region and is expected to be extended to other regions of world. With this system, WWAP is aiming to show where systems are failing and to provide information needed for efficient and effective capacity building throughout world.