The water portal: a decision support system for water governance

The World Water Assessment Programme (WWAP) is a UN-system wide programme involving all agencies and convention secretariats concerned with freshwater. It responds to the 1998 call by the UN Commission for sustainable development for the UN system to undertake period assessments of "the sustainable development, management, protection and use of fresh water resources". The commission requested that progress towards goals adopted in Agenda 21 be monitored and that "a global picture of the state of freshwater resources and potential problems" be drawn. The WWAP has been recognized as the flagship programme of the newly created UN-Water. The main goals of the programme are to assess the state of the world's freshwater resources, identify critical issues and problems, develop indicators, measure progress towards achieving sustainable use of water resources and help countries develop their own assessment capacity. One of the main conclusions of the first edition of the World Water Development Report was that the current world's water crisis is mainly a crisis of water governance. To tackle this issue the WWAP has initiated a project called 'Decision Support System for Water Governance. This project is being developed through a regional prototype named SAGA (Sistema de Apoyo a la Gobernabilidad del Agua) that is located in the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region and is expected to be extended to other regions of the world. With this system, WWAP is aiming to show where systems are failing and to provide the information needed for efficient and effective capacity building throughout the world.