WaPOR, as it is widely known, is expanding its geospatially driven coverage to the whole world, following six years of successful use in Africa and the Near East. The new and improved version was launched today at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) at the 2nd Rome Water Dialogue and on the sidelines of the Global Symposium on Soils and Water.
The new version, tapping a wider array of satellite inputs and adapted to cutting-edge sensor technologies, increases the granularity of assessments, whose resolution can now bore down to field-scale applications where a pixel represents 20 meters of land surface, which can be used by farmers to decide when to irrigate and how much water is needed for their crops.
“We will get better data, allowing us to go beyond general numbers for entire countries,” said Jippe Hoogeveen, Chief Technical Advisor of the WaPOR programme. “This will allow governments to integrate the knowledge into more holistic, integrated, and targeted rural development plans, as well as contributing to better tracking of SDG6 objectives.
