News & Comment

Transforming how we understand, value and manage water towards water security and resilience will accelerate progress in achieving the 2030 Agenda. On 22–24 March 2023, a unique United Nations (UN) Conference on water will be held, uniting the world for water. We reflect on this once-in-generation opportunity, and how it can spillover a just and sustainable transformation across all sectors and governance levels.

As climate-induced shocks and stresses increasingly occupy media attention, funding, national and global policy, and technical practice are shifting towards alignment with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s (UNFCCC’s) Paris Agreement and away from the more narrowly sectoral Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Water resilience is emerging as a critical delivery mechanism for the Paris Agreement as the importance of adaptation and resilience accelerates. The SDGs, in contrast, have been unable to make use of either water resources or climate resilience as enabling tools for cross-sectoral integration and development coherence.

The United Nation 2023 Water Conference offers a critical opportunity to catalyse actions and innovations that bring increased water security to vulnerable communities across the globe. Researchers have an important role in supporting the delivery of needed on-the-ground impact, but their work must be informed by the priorities and necessities of Global South implementors.

The health and non-health impacts of water collection and other water-related work should be monitored and considered in policies and programs to improve women’s lives.

The use of satellite technology is revolutionizing the measurement of Earth’s water.

Climate change and other human activities are modifying river water temperature globally. A more holistic understanding of river temperature dynamics in an integrated climate–land–hydrology–human framework is urgently needed for sustainable river management and adaptation strategies.

The surface water and ocean topography mission, known as SWOT tracks Earth’s surface water with unprecedented accuracy and completeness, improving our understanding of water under the changing climate. Nadya Vinogradova Shiffer is program manager of Ocean Physics, lead of Climate Variability and Change at NASA headquarters, program scientist of SWOT and co-founder of a non-profit organization for research in Earth science. In her conversation with Nature Water, she speaks about what SWOT will bring and why SWOT matters.

Academics, funders and publishers need to support interdisciplinary research processes in which social sciences are placed on an equal footing with the natural sciences and engineering.

Nature Water aims to be a venue for all research on the evolving relationship between water resources and society.

Since water is a common good, the outcome of water-related research should be accessible to everyone. Since Open Science is more than just open access research articles, journals must work with the research community to enable fully open and FAIR science

While the benefits of FAIR principles — findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable — and Open Data seem clear to most scientists, significant hurdles need to be overcome to make scientific databases useful and sustainable. The difficulties with incentivizing the community to share data, as encountered by the recently launched Open Membrane Database (OMD), can be used as a starting point to fuel the debate on the power and pitfalls of FAIR and Open Data practices.