As technology rapidly “disrupts” the entire development landscape, it is useful for us all to reimagine a new world of hydroinformatics that are less burdened by problems of the past and offer opportunities to rethink how water resources can be planned and management in a modern manner.
The new rapidly evolving world of disruptive technologies is changing the world of water resources management in fundamental ways (see a summary for large basins ). Some examples of how hydroinformatics that leverages these new innovations could impact the way water resources are planned and managed include:
There is a need to ensure integration of the various parts of data and analytics for users to access, visualize, and interact with the information to support decisions. This requires a great degree of inter-operability amongst these systems. This has implications not only on the kinds of monitoring systems procured (to avoid vendor capture on hardware that is not interoperable with other information), but also to ensure that all the relevant data can be visualized and analyzed using interoperable dashboards or other platforms. The emerging world of online services, especially cloud storage and services, is critical in this regard to tie it all together.
There is much that governments can do to help the institutional environment to better enable constructive “disruption” in hydroinformatics. Governments can use their convening power to facilitate interaction among stakeholder groups within the nation as well as with rapidly-evolving global good practice. This is especially critical to leverage new forms of information, interaction. innovation, investment and integration to improve inter-operability and remain constantly evolving to avoid stranded assets of obsolete technology. They can play a key role in providing a facilitating environment for innovative startups in hydroinformatics providing monitoring, analytics, or insights as a service, as well as helping develop appropriate multi-stakeholder forums (e.g. for integrated water resources or watershed management), networking relevant stakeholder from government, water and hydropower utilities, farmers, academia, CSOs, and other private sector to help develop a shared vision for water resources and water services planning and management knit together by the power of modern hydroinformatics helping stakeholders work across traditional sectoral and spatial boundaries.
They also have a key role in managing the risks – of cybersecurity, privacy, ensuring adequate competition, ensuring basic connectivity, facilitating affordability of services, and providing retraining and social safety nets for some obsolete jobs, while creating new employment opportunities. They have a key role in embedding hydroinformatics as part of an e-governance vision to knit the work of government agencies together (e.g. those involved with water resources management, water infrastructure operation and service delivery, river regulation, flood/drought management and early warning, and climate change planning.
Leveraging the wisdom of the crowd, especially the youth, is a promising institutional approach globally. Across the world, various competitions including hackathons (see World Bank Lessons from Water Hackathons ), data jams, blogathon, X-prize, design and other innovation challenges are being organized to develop solutions to the most pressing water sector problems of our times. Internships on various aspects of hydroinformatics (e.g. at provincial, national, or regional water-related agencies) are also an excellent way to leverage the cutting-edge talent and enthusiasm of budding professionals while contributing to a more developmentally-aware next generation.
Governments have a key role in helping enact policies that enable modern hydroinformatics to take root and flourish. A major aspect of this is to do with facilitating a culture of open data (especially for locally monitored in-situ and drone data) and cloud analytics. This can help create an ecosystem of applications that leverage both these locally collected data and the wealth of already public domain data, especially from earth observation to create new free or low-cost services targeted to address key water-related challenges. This is especially problematic in transboundary basins (within and across countries) and needs a strong change management campaign to overcome decades of traditional secrecy, obfuscation, inertia, and often a culture of “data-free analysis and analysis-free decision making” to embrace a modern world of transparent open data services based on modern interoperable standards to unleash a true hydroinformatics data revolution.
Progressive policies in integrated water resources and watershed management – such as payment for ecosystem services – are also stymied by lack of reliable data (e.g. on water quantity and quality) that need to be addressed by modern hydroinformatics.
There are a number of opportunities that are emerging based on a rapidly increasing set of “eyes in the sky” (e.g., the upcoming SWOT mission) and in-situ sensors and associated technologies for data transmission, analysis, and access. The World Bank is supporting the use of these systems across the world in a number of operational projects (ranging from the Nile Basin Decision Support System at regional level to the India National Hydrology Project). Most of these engagements have been strengthened by a long-term framework of many successor projects to help build the foundations that are required to collect, analyze, and use relevant water resources data. There are emerging opportunities to modernize hydroinformatics approaches at the regional level (in transboundary areas ranging from the Amazon and Mekong to the Mashreq and Central Asia) and national/sub-national levels (in almost every Bank client nation across the world) with rapid learning across the world.
The Bank is also developing updated interactive dashboards to explore a growing range of hydroinformatics and water in agriculture data and analytics services in the public domain (as well as an internal Bank Geospatial Platform) and improving the knowledge, learning, and outreach aspects of these approaches. These also demonstrate the ability to use global approaches for data, analytics, knowledge, and learning to support regional and national/sub-national applications by using “wholesale” online platforms rather than building traditional “retail” level desktop applications. This will be facilitated by the more widespread adoption of new standards for interoperability of services (e.g., the WaterML standard of the OGC standards and open APIs), as well as the availability of new online data processing platforms (e.g. Google Earth Engine and the emerging Open Data Cube ).
As these systems help us get over old seemingly-intractable challenges, there are new challenges to overcome especially in the developing world to better deploy modern hydroinformatics. There is a need to improve awareness by socializing these new approaches among both technocrats and other senior decision makers. There is a particular need to change mindsets in terms of openness of water-related data that is particularly problematic in most countries (including many developed countries) where not a SINGLE gauge site of timeseries weather, flow, groundwater, or water quality data is made available in modern truly open data machine readable online service formats for integration into the new generation of analytical tools. This becomes a key constraint for model calibration in traditional hydrologic models and in training for new machine-learning approaches.
There is also quite a real digital divide – especially in terms of internet access with appropriate bandwidths, rollout of new mobile data such as 5G, availability of smartphones, tablets, touchscreens, VR/AR, and other institutional infrastructure. A major constraint has always been the capacity to adapt and use these technologies for modernizing water resources decision making, but the level of automation of the novel approaches have dramatically changed the type of expertise required in this regard. The ability of governments at all levels to build new partnerships with academia, private sector, and CSOs (Civil Society Organizations) is also changing the way relevant hydroinformatics data is collected, analyzed, accessed, and used to support decisions. As more countries embrace open data and standards and put more of their especially in-situ data in the public domain, they can create an enabling environment for a new age of hydroinformatics to thrive and positively “disrupt” how water is managed globally for all users.
This rapid evolution of technology and capacity across the world can help promote the use of these hydroinformatics approaches to benefit the poor in terms of more climate-resilient water systems and reduced risks from hydro-meteorological disasters. This will require us to not only build on the tech enablers but also ensure that the non-tech enablers to improve information-based decision making are strengthened by improved awareness of rapidly evolving hydroinformatics global good practices.