About Us

River and mountains in winterThe world needs a focus on water in order to deal with global change in a sustainable manner.

The Sustainable Water Future Programme (Water Future) of Future Earth is a global platform facilitating international scientific collaboration to drive solutions to the world’s water problems. Consistent with the broad objectives of the Sustainable Development Goal for Water, research conducted through Water Future seeks to ensure a balance between the needs of humankind and nature, and to offer real solutions, underpinned by interdisciplinary science, to deliver a sustainable ‘water world’. Water Future champions the application of integrated research to generate solutions that can be used to support policies for sustainable development. The programme serves as an ideas incubator, network hub and translator of scientific findings to address science, engineering, governance and management issues and drive policy change. The programme brings a unique, systems-level perspective to develop integrated approaches for both diagnosing water-related challenges and crafting innovative solutions.

Water connects us all

Water is the life-blood of our planet: it is vital for human life and public health; grows our food that we eat; nurtures the environment that sustains our planet; and flows through and connects the economies we depend on.” (High Level Panel on Water, 2016)

Boy with water falling over himWater is essential to life on earth, plays a key role in the development and functioning of society and is recognised as a high priority resource for sustainable development. Over the past few decades, environmental science has produced insights into the linkages, interconnections and inter-dependencies in the global water cycle.  The global water system is being transformed through elements such as climate change, environmental hazards, population growth, health risks (e.g. sanitation) economic development, technological innovations, and pollution.

 As a society, we need to address and manage these issues effectively as water security remains far from universally enjoyed.

  • By 2025, 25% of the world’s population will be living in water-insecure countries.
  • At least 1.8 billion people globally use a source of drinking water that is fecally contaminated.
  • Over 1.7 billion people are currently living in river basins where water use exceeds recharge.
  • More than 80% of wastewater resulting from human activities is discharged into rivers or the sea without any pollution removal.
  • Each day, nearly 1,000 children die due to preventable water- and sanitation-related diseases.
  • Floods and other water-related incidents account for 70% of all deaths from natural disasters.

Without sufficient and appropriate policy and investment responses, sustainable development will not be achievable, leading to low levels of well-being improvements and sub-optimal economic development, coupled with severe environmental impacts, as developing regions follow the moribund ‘impair, then repair’ model of development. Within this context, the global community has renewed its commitments towards equitable and sustainable development through the inauguration of the United Nations ‘2030 Agenda’ and the Sustainable Development Goals.

Water Treatment PlantThe global environmental changes combined suggests that our world has entered what is known as the Anthropocene; an era where the impact of human society has become so profound, it’s influence is anticipated to be felt on a global and geological scale.

The mission of Water Future is to move the focus and direction of  our global community to face the myriad of challenges affecting our water systems. Without this focus, many of the SDGs will likely be beyond reach.

Water Future is the central water activity under Future Earth, an international research platform, with the ability to direct and drive responses to global environmental change. As it is building on a decade of coordinated international research from the Global Water System Project (GWSP), Water Future has the capacity to provide the necessary mechanisms and frameworks to facilitate cooperation between academia, industry and government.

Both efforts endeavor to study the complex global water system, focusing on its interactions with the natural and human systems. Aligning with research from the GWSP, Water Future focuses on the diagnosis of water problems using advanced data sets and analytical tools. As part of Future Earth, Water Future is supported by the International Council for Science, the International Social Science Council, the Belmont Forum of funding agencies, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the United Nations Environment Protection Programme, the United Nations University, and the World Meteorological Organization.

 

GWSP Evolution Timeline

This timeline illustrates the evolution of GWSP within organizations and programmes.

1980

WCRP

1980

Scientists, led by Swedish meterologist, Bert Bolin formed the international World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) to study the predictability of climate and the potential effects from humanity on climate. They received joint sponsorship of the International Council for Science (ICSU) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO)

1987

IGBP

1987

A team of researchers, led by Bert Bolin, James McCarthy, Paul Crutzen, H. Oeschger amongst others, successfully argued for an international research programme to coordinate international research on a global and regional scale. This involved invesitation of the interaction between Earth’s biological, chemical and physical processes and their interactions with human systems. This programme, sponsored by the International Council for Science (ICSU), was known as the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) . The programme had eight projects investigating different aspects of the Earth system, until its closure in 2015.

1991

DIVERSITAS

1991

Established in 1991 by three international organisations, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE) and the International Union of Biological Science (IUBS).   The DIVERSITAS addressed the complex scientific questions posed by the loss in biodiversity and ecosystem services and to offer science-based solutions to this crisis.

1996

IHDP

1996

The International Human Dimensions Programme (IHDP) was initially founded in 1990 by the International Social Science Council (ISSC)  to work toward a better understanding of human interaction with and within their natural environment. The programme facilitated dialogue between science and policy to ensure that research results fed into policy-planning and law-making processes, and offered education and training to what were future leaders in the field.

2001

Amsterdam Declaration

2001

WCRP, IGBP, and IHDP  led the  Global Change Open Science Conference with more than 1400 participants, from over 100 countries. This conference led to the historic Amsterdam Declaration on Earth System Science of 2001.

This signed declaration called for strengthening cooperation amongst global environmental research programmes, greater integration and collaboration across disciplines and boundaries.

2001

ESSP

2001

Four international global environmental change research programmes: DIVERSITASIGBPIHDP, and WCRP joined together to form the Earth System Science Partnership (ESSP). The ESSP brings together researchers globally and from various disciplines to undertake integrated studies of the Earth System.

2004

GWSP

2004

The Global Water Systems Project (GWSP) was formed as a core project of ESSP from the four Global Environmental Change Programmes (DIVERSITAS, IGBP , IHDP, and WCRP) to understand the complex global water systems with its interactions between natural and human components and their feedback.

2013

Future Earth

2013

Future Earth is built on many decades of international research on global environmental change carried out by projects sponsored by DIVERSITAS,  IGBP and IHDP. Future Earth aims to advance Global Sustainability Science, build capacity in this rapidly expanding area of research and provide an international research agenda to guide natural and social scientists working around the world.

2013

Bonn Water Declaration

2013

Water Future was formed a result of the GWSP conference, Water in the Anthropocene, held in Bonn in 2013. The conference elaborated on the current state of interdisciplinary water research, setting the stage for the next stage in the evolution of the global water research agenda, namely, to more formally connect research to improved decision making. As an output of the Bonn Conference, the water research and practioner community made a set of core recommendations in The Bonn Declaration on Global Water Security, which addressed the institutions and individuals focused on science, governance, management and decision-making relevant to water resources. The declaration called for joint global action to develop a broad community consensus for a multi-perspective and multi-scale knowledge-to-action water agenda based on these recommendations.

2015

Water Future

2015

The Water Future Programme was launched in Brisbane during the International River Symposium.