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WaPOR, remote sensing for water productivity

WaPOR and the Sustainable Development Goals

SDG 06 - Clean Water and Sanitation
The project is particularly suited to address and monitor the 6th SDG on water and sanitation (read about the organisation's contribution towards attaining that goal, here), more precisely target 6.4: “by 2030, substantially increase water-use efficiency across all sectors and ensure sustainable withdrawals and supply of freshwater to address water scarcity and substantially reduce the number of people suffering from water scarcity”.

WaPOR contributes to achieving the following sustainable development goals: 

SDG 01 - No Poverty  SDG 02 - Zero Hunger  SDG 06 - Clean Water and Sanitation  SDG 13 - Climate Action  SDG 15 - Life on Land

  • SDG 1: to end poverty in all its forms everywhere, by supporting more resilient agricultural systems that can better and more reliably meet the needs of the people that work and depend on them.
  • SDG 2: to end hunger, achieve food security and improve nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture, by supporting resilient agricultural systems that draw sustainably from available water resources.
  • SDG 6: to ensure the availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all, by supporting water management initiatives with robust data that allows informed decision-making as well as supporting solutions that can help water users in agriculture make the most of their share of this dwindling resource, while ensuring that other water users can also get access, including environmental flows.
  • SDG 13: to take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts, by contributing to strengthening of the resilience and adaptive capacity of agricultural systems to climate-related hazards and the unpredictable changes in the weather patterns,
  • SDG 15: to protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss, by supporting increases in the productivity of existing cultivated lands, informing water management efforts that do not compromise on the importance of water flows that are essential to certain ecosystems, contributing to the monitoring of land cover, among others. 

Applications and uses of WaPOR data keep expanding as does the user-base and as the project progresses in the beneficiary countries of its second phase (ongoing). While these are the main SDGs that the project contributes to, in a more direct manner, there are ways in which the project can touch on other goals that are dependent on applications and modes of implementation. 

Water Action Agenda commitments:

During the 2023 UN Water Conference in March, hundreds of new entries (commitments) were added to the UN Partnership Platform, a global registry of voluntary commitments and multi-stakeholder partnerships made by stakeholders in support of the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Two of these commitments feature the WaPOR portal and its data, click to find out more about each:

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WaPOR session at the 2023 UN Water conference in the UN headquarters in NYC. 
The FAO is the custodian agency for SDG 6. Read more about the organization's work towards that goal and its targets: 

 

Water action agenda commitments featuring WaPOR: 

Read more about WaPOR's participation at the 2023 UN Water conference for the midterm comprehensive review of implementation of the UN Decade for Action on Water and Sanitation (2018-2028) here, a key event where the world got together to discuss progress towards water-related SDGs.