Outcome of the 'Visual Inspection for Defining the Safety Upgrading Strategies’ (VISUS) approach to assess the school safety in the Chimanimani District after the Cyclone Idai. A VISUS survey across 15 schools in the Chimanimani district was conducted to gauge rehabilitation needs and identify key areas to build resilience.

Natural disasters frequently damage or destroy school infrastructure, jeopardizing educational opportunities and putting school children's lives in danger. This was experienced by children and staff members in Zimbabwe, Chimanimani and Chipinge districts in particular during cyclone Idai which hit eastern Zimbabwe in 2019 and the cyclones that followed. More than 140 schools were affected by the floods and the land slides. The situation at St. Charles Lwanga High School, where 200 children, teachers and support staff were stranded for two days and had to face the cyclone, shows the importance of safe school infrastructure. To better prepare for such eventualities, UNESCO through the Zimbabwe Idai Recovery Project funded by World Bank and managed by UNOPS collaborated with the University of Udine and the University of Zimbabwe to implement the VISUS (Visual Inspection for Defining the Safety Upgrading Strategies), a multi-hazard school safety assessment methodology that help policymakers decide where to focus risk reduction efforts based on available resources and scientific evidence. The VISUS methodology helps assess schools using a holistic, multi-hazard approach that considers five aspects: site conditions, structural performance, local structural criticalities, non-structural components, and functional aspects. The methodology has also been improved to consider outbreak of disease such as COVID-19. The VISUS methodology was conceived as an effective decision making tool for planning risk mitigation actions. The project helped mainstream school safety components into the UNOPS’ School Rehabilitation Program and could contribute to the Civil Protection Unit’s School Disaster Education Programme. The team’s efforts also assisted in making investments decisions to strengthen the safety of schools efficiently and economically.

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About the data:

This dataset consists of soil moisture and temperature measurements collected from TOMST (https://tomst.com/web/en/systems/tms/tms-4/) data loggers in several locations in Africa but also in Cuba. The dataset consists of three near-surface temperature measurements (12 cm ground surface (Temp: +12 cm), on the ground surface (Temp: 0 cm), and just below the surface (Temp: -6 cm). Measurements of soil moisture are collected at a depth of 15 cm below the ground using the Time Domain Transmittometry technique. The TOMST loggers record soil moisture measurements as raw electric signals, which have to be converted to volumetric soil moisture content by a calibration approach. At the moment, we have used a global calibration curve (independent of soil texture) as we calibrate the loggers for different textures. The dataset herein includes the raw sensor readings, which can be calibrated using the TMS calibration guide https://tomst.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/TMS-calibration-handbook.pdf

Utilization:

The dataset is intended for applications in hydrology to monitor long-term soil moisture conditions, agricultural droughts (vegetation water deficit), validate soil moisture and evapotranspiration observations from remote sensing, and soil water balance models. In some cases, the data is also being used to assess the suitability of using this type of sensor for irrigation scheduling and water conservation. We have deployed these loggers to evaluate whether the fine resolution (250m) data from FAO’s Water Productivity through Open access of Remotely sensed derived data (WaPOR) can be used to contribute to relevant and timely drought monitoring at micro-scale, and how drought indices computed from WaPOR-data correspond to soil moisture trends at field scale.

Reports and datasets generated as part of the Climate Risk Informed Decision Analysis (CRIDA) implemented in the Chimanimani Districts, in response to Cyclone Idai and to build resilience of local communities to climate change impacts.

Zimbabwe is exposed to multiple weather-related hazards, suffering from frequent periodic cyclones, droughts, floods, and related epidemics and landslides. On 15 March 2019, tropical Cyclone Idai hit eastern Zimbabwe, and at least 172 deaths were reported, more than 186 people were injured and 327 were missing, while over 270,000 people were affected across nine districts, particularly in Chimanimani and Chipinge. Of those affected, 20,002 households (61.5%) or 100,106 people (74.2% of the 2012 population) were in Chimanimani. Meanwhile, ecosystem damage also occurred where boulders and mud were dumped downhill, affecting wildlife habitats, water quality, tourism activities and usability of land resources. The cyclone’s aftermath has therefore increased environmental risks, which will in turn affect local adaptation. Loss of vegetation cover means the natural defense against future flood waters and landslides is no longer available. Similar events in future are therefore likely to cause even more destruction. The overall objective of the initiative is therefore to reduce the vulnerability of communities in the Chimanimani and Chipinge Districts to natural disasters, such as floods, droughts and landslides; and to enhance water resource management as well as ecosystem services in response to the uncertainty of future climate change. The project is designed to approach the water-related risk and vulnerability through an integrated strategy that targets several aspects of disaster risk reduction, and provides scalable implementation of the project through a modular pathway and the development of case studies in target flood and landslide prone areas.

The Global Gravity-based Groundwater Product (G3P) provides groundwater storage anomalies (GWSA) from a cross-cutting combination of GRACE/GRACE-FO-based terrestrial water storage (TWS) and storage compartments of the water cycle (WSCs) that are part of the Copernicus portfolio. The data set comprises gridded anomalies of groundwater, TWS, and the WSCs glacier, snow, soil moisture and surface water bodies plus layers containing uncertainty information for the individual data products. All WSCs are spatially filtered with a Gaussian filter to be compatible with TWS. Spatial coverage is global, except Greenland and Antarctica, with 0.5-degree resolution. Temporal coverage is from April 2002 to September 2023 with monthly temporal resolution. Gridded data sets are available as NetCDF files containing variables for the parameter value as anomaly in mm equivalent water height and the parameter’s uncertainty as mm equivalent water height.

The latest version of the data is visualized at the GravIS portal: https://gravis.gfz-potsdam.de/gws. From GravIS, the data is also available as area averages for several large river basins and aquifers, as well as for climatically similar regions.

G3P was funded by the EU Horizon 2020 programme in response to the call LC-SPACE-04-EO-2019-2020 “Copernicus evolution – Research activities in support of cross-cutting applications between Copernicus services” under grant agreement No. 870353.

A compilation of secondary surface- and groundwater quality measurements assembled to characterize hydrochemistry, contaminants, isotopes, and bacteriological parameters across the Ethiopian portion of the Lake Turkana basin. This dataset underpins statistical and geospatial analyses to inform sustainable water-resource management.

This dataset contains the official materials from the launch event of the IHP-WINS (International Hydrological Programme – Water Information Network System) platform, held on 28 April 2023. It includes the launch brochure, the presentation delivered during the event, and the full recording of the webinar. These resources provide an overview of the platform’s objectives, functionalities, and relevance in supporting data sharing, open science, and collaborative water resources management. The dataset serves as a reference for stakeholders, partners, and contributors interested in learning about the vision and practical applications of IHP-WINS.

The global crises of biodiversity and cultural diversity are interdependent, especially so in rivers. While we know that 84% of the freshwater fauna has disappeared between 1970 and 2014, the loss in cultural diversity connected to the river and its floodplain (e.g., spiritual linkages, traditional use forms, adapted architecture, etc.) is as yet un-known. This book makes a first attempt to deal with biological and cultural diversities altogether, depicting the bio-cul-tural diversities, historical human-river relation-ships, threats, and practical examples of how to mitigate the crisis in riverscapes. More than 120 authors present interdisciplinary studies from river systems all over the world, and explore overarching issues on river ma-nagement in the Anthropocene.

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Overview of the IHP Phase VIII Achievements

Recognizing the value of transboundary water systems and the fact that many of them continue to be degraded and managed in fragmented ways, the Global Environment Facility Transboundary Water Assessment Programme (GEF TWAP) was developed. The Programme aims to provide a baseline assessment that identifies and evaluates changes in these water systems caused by human activities and natural processes, and the consequences such have on dependant human populations. The project is the first truly global comparative assessment for transboundary aquifers, lakes, rivers and large marine ecosystems, as well as a thematic evaluation of the open ocean, through institutional partnerships that hope to seed future global assessments. The project results are envisioned to assist the GEF and other international organizations in setting priorities for supporting the conservation of transboundary water systems. More information on TWAP including final reports can be found on www.geftwap.org

This portal gives access to the map based results from the Groundwater component of the Transboundary Waters Assessment Programme. The data shown in this portal have been made available by national experts from countries involved in the TWAP Groundwater project. It also includes the results from scenario analyses using the global WaterGAP model (University of Frankfurt, Germany) and a study on groundwater systems of small island developing states, also called SIDS (Simon Frasier University, Canada). More information on TWAP Groundwater, including reports on methodology and outcomes, can be found on www.twap.isarm.org

Large-sample datasets are essential in hydrological science to support modelling studies and global assessments. The present dataset compiles all freshwater quality data that is available under open data policy (CC BY 4.0 or equivalent) at the GEMStat database for global water quality (www.gemstat.org). It includes over 20,000,000 measurements on 608 water quality parameters, covering 13,660 stations in 37 countries over the time period from 1906 to 2023.

GEMStat is operated by the GEMS/Water programme of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and hosted at the International Centre for Water Resources and Global Change (ICWRGC) and the German Federal Institute of Hydrology (BfG). The data in GEMStat is provided by National Hydrological Services of UN member states.

National Report - IHP-ROK activities undertaken in the period April 2022 - February 2024

The CRIDA approach provides a crucial framework to enable water managers and policy makers to assess the impact of climate uncertainty and change on their water resources and work towards effective adaptation strategies. This multi-step process embraces a participatory, bottom-up approach to identify water security hazards, and is sensitive to indigenous and gender-related water vulnerabilities. By engaging local communities in the design of the analysis, the information provided by scientific modeling and climate analysis can be tailored and thus provide more useful answers to the challenges they are facing. They are also providing a more informed starting point to assess the different options for adaptation, and design robust adaptation pathways, in line with the local needs.

This publication aims to bridge the gap between climate and disasters, in the face of the uncertainties that climate change poses to water managers and policymakers. Composed of a compilation of worldwide case studies, it provides examples of innovative water management and climate risk assessment approaches. The publication also highlights the National Determined Contributions (NDCs) and National Adaptation Plans (NAPs) with the aim of identifying links between these high-level frameworks, DRR and water issues, and describing how the policy-practice linkages can be turned into action.

This publication has laid out a strategic framework to integrate Open Science into hydrology, illustrating its true potential to enhance research transparency, collaboration, and accessibility within water management practices. The six pillars — open data, open source, open publishing, open infrastructure, open education, and open participation — constitute the structure of the Open Hydrology framework designed to promote transparency and reproducibility.

This publication reviews the current state-of-the-art of AI and Machine Learning (ML) applications within water management, introducing some of the main concepts and providing the reader with a general understanding of different technologies and concepts. Further, it features examples of the most influential applications of AI within water management and highlights the ethical challenges when streamlining AI for water resources management.