Introducing the new episode of our Space4Water Webinar Series!
How can we turn decades of Earth observation and space-based data into better decisions about one of our most vital resources: water?
Our new installment of the Space4Water Webinar Series "From Data to Action" brings together water experts, practitioners, and institutions to explore how space-based data, technologies, and knowledge can be translated into practical solutions for water management and decision-making.
Join us on 16 September for our first webinar: “Guiding a New Philosophy of Water Management in a Time of Growing Crises,” with Dr. Alan Belwahand-drawnrd.
For most of human history, water management has been shaped by single frames, frozen in time — through maps, photographs from the ground and then from the air, hand-drawn sketches and classical landscape paintings dating back a couple of thousand years or more. Whilst not quite deep time (though water and deep time are unequivocally connected – water has shaped the very landscapes in which we live), these are snapshots of a system that moves in decades and centuries and provide fixed reference points from which management decisions can be drawn. But this framework changed in 1972, when Earth observing satellites began giving us something no civilisation has ever had before: the same picture, of the same place, over and over, for more than fifty years. This webinar explores what that continuous, borderless record of the planet's water — captured in tools like the Global Atlas of Surface Water Dynamics — means for how we manage a resource now in visible, accelerating crisis. From vanishing lakes to catastrophic floods, from the Po Valley to the Brahmaputra basin, we'll look at what dense-time observation reveals about water today, and why it demands nothing less than a new philosophy of water governance — one built on shared evidence rather than sovereign or local guesswork. In 1957, the Prime Minister of the day, Harold Macmillan, told the United Kingdom it had never had it so good. On water, today, no one in any nation on Earth could honestly say the same — and for the first time, we can actually see why.
This is the first webinar in a restarting regular series exploring how space-based solutions can address water challenges worldwide, while providing an opportunity for the Space4Water community to exchange knowledge, solutions and lessons learned.
--------
Dr. Alan Belward has spent his career using satellite Earth observation to support environmental monitoring and policy. Over more than three decades at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre, he helped shape how scientific evidence informs policy on sustainable development, food security, and climate change, retiring as Deputy Director of Sustainable Development in 2024. He co-developed the Global Surface Water Explorer, now used by the UN to track progress on the freshwater ecosystem Sustainable Development Goal, and co-authored the Baveno Manifesto, the scientific foundation for Europe's Copernicus Earth Observation programme. Alan has served on the Steering Committee of the UN's Global Climate Observing System, chairing its terrestrial panel and leading revisions to its Implementation Plan, and has advised G7, ESA, and NASA/USGS Earth observation initiatives. He holds a PhD in satellite remote sensing from Cranfield University and is a Fellow of the UK’s Royal Society of Biology.
--------
The Space4Water Webinar Series "From Data to Action" brings together experts, practitioners and institutions to explore how space-based data, technologies and knowledge can be translated into practical solutions for water management and decision-making. The series will feature scientific advances, operational tools, applied projects and real-world experience across areas such as water availability, drought and floods, agriculture, groundwater, climate resilience, ecosystems and river-basin management. It will also provide a platform for Space4Water stakeholders, experts and thematic working groups to share results, solutions and lessons learned, while offering new organizations and specialists an entry point into the Space4Water community.
