The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs and the Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water (PSIPW) launched the space4water portal during the eighth edition of the PSIPW award ceremony hosted at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. The new portal will serve as a platform to gather information and strengthen partnerships related to space-based information for water accessibility.
Water scarcity has become a major concern in several countries around the world. The importance of having a common framework to enhance available and sustainable water and to work towards increasing its accessibility is a priority that is addressed within the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The importance of space technology in helping to manage the issue has led UNOOSA and PSIPW to launch the project, which was being shaped since 2008.
Since then, several conferences on space technologies and water management were held and co-organized by both organizations, and in 2016, UNOOSA and PSIPW signed a Memorandum of Understanding to collaborate towards a future with sustainable and available water.
The Space4water portal includes recommended practices, databases with tools and data sources, and works to enable space and water communities to come together to work on making the information available for everyone. It focuses especially on developing countries, where the space4water Portal will complement online resources will offline capacity-building activities.
