Watermarq Bimonthly Update - 02.10.24
Read on for insights from our latest basin water risk analysis, team updates and events, and our top recent reads and projects 🚀.
Water supply and demand dynamics in the Zambezi basin
We’ve just completed the latest stage of analysis of water supply and demand dynamics in the Zambezi river basin. By integrating remote sensing, global datasets, and ground data, we have reached a granular picture of the dynamics between surface water, groundwater, rainfall, and agricultural, industrial and domestic consumption. This has revealed trends not usually visible from aggregated data, such as…
💡Increasing surface water availability in some sub-basins driven by the construction of new reservoirs, at the same time as decreasing levels in the larger pre-existing reservoirs.
💡Whilst agricultural water consumption has remained relatively stable, shifting crop distribution across the basin has implications for green and blue water demand at a finer spatial resolution.
Next we will be working with partners to apply these insights for decision-making and water security action in Zambia, expanding our analysis to other regions, and developing openly accessible reports and tools.
Team updates
🛰️ After Alex Money 's whirlwind of events at Stockholm Water Week in August, our Geospatial Lead Sara Pruckner attended the Geo for Good Mini-Summit in Dublin from September 23-26. There were plenty of excellent talks from a variety of organizations (most are available online here), and a lot of great connections were made. Highlights include DHI flagging the upcoming Global Wetland Watch, and USGS presenting their work on water quality. The Hackathon on Day 4 produced unexpectedly accurate results for crop type mapping without field data, which can be used in the future to get a more accurate picture of agricultural water demand and productivity, especially in a low-data and low-resource context. We are still exploring the use of Google Earth Engine for Watermarq’s data analysis needs, but are fascinated by the ever-improving functionality, such as using embedding fields and integrating foundational models from Vertex AI.
Recommended by LinkedIn
🤝 Our current Innovation Lead Bethan Adams will be switching to an Impact Lead role from October, taking responsibility for developing and measuring the impact of Watermarq’s knowledge products, building partnerships, and ensuring tangible outcomes for basin water security.
🌍 Attending COP29? George Carew-Jones will be in Baku in week 2 and would be happy to connect to share more about Watermarq’s work on data integration, capacity building and valuation for basin water security.
Plus lots more exciting discussions and developments behind the scenes with our partners, our Advisory Board, and at our team Strategy Day last week.
Our top reads & projects
🪙 SEB’s September Green Bond report, containing multiple thematic reports on water, covering the economic and governance deadlocks to water investments at scale, and what the future of water finance could look like from a bank’s perspective.
⚡ A new dataset from the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) on Spatially distributed freshwater demand for electricity in Africa, providing freshwater demand and characteristic data for 2020 across 2,534 power plants across 54 countries, down to the river basin scale.
📃 EFRAG’s report on Initial Observed Practices on the implementation of ESRS, highlighting the shift from judgement-based to evidence-based materiality assessments; difficulties in retrieving data across all material topics and ensuring data is accompanied by a clear context and framing; and the value of a thorough double materiality assessment for "beyond" compliance activity, for strategic ESG oversight, risk management, and assessment of transactions.
🔍 Interesting applications of AI for retrieving contextual WASH insights, analysing corporate sustainability disclosures using large language models and natural language processing, and deriving open-source impact data.
If you’d like to discuss any of the above, or have specific data needs relating to water availability dynamics, ESRS E3, or water valuation, please get in touch with a member of the team or email us at info@wtrmrq.com.