Water quantity

Water scarcity and quality decline is a rapidly increasing challenges and becoming a top concern globally. To wisely manage water and achieve sustainable development, rapid and precise monitoring of water resources is crucial. Earth observation (EO) technologies play a key role in monitoring surface and underground water resources by providing rapid, continuous, high-quality, and low-cost EO data, products, and services. Currently, there are promising efforts in the use of EO technologies for water resource management but there are still huge gaps in the Africa region. The reason for the low utilization of EO technologies can be due to a lack of resources and funding including skilled and motivated human resources in the field and the lack of political commitment to foster EO products, data, and services. Therefore, the use of space technologies and their products to solve water-related problems needs collaborative efforts of all concerned stakeholders from global to local levels.

Jakarta, “the sinking city”, is the current capital city of Indonesia. Located on the Java Sea, this coastal city is home to nearly 30 million people within the greater-Jakarta area. Jakarta has grappled with water management issues for decades, leading to several current day water-related crises. Access to a reliable, potable water supply is extremely limited as there is a significant disparity between those with piped water access and those without. Citizens without piped water access have consequently relied heavily on groundwater and have dug thousands of unregulated wells as a result. This has led to a second water crisis – the chronic overextraction of Jakarta’s underground aquifers. Land subsidence is of the utmost concern as this sinking city is placed at high flood risk from the surrounding ocean. Approximately 40% of Jakarta now lies below sea level as a result and predictive models suggest that the entire city will be underwater by 2050 (Gilmartin, 2019). Compounding these problems, the climate crisis has led to significant sea level rise as glaciers and ice caps continue to melt (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2019; Lindsey, 2022). As the city of Jakarta continues to sink and sea levels rise, millions of citizens within Jakarta are at extremely high risk of flooding, particularly during monsoon season. Thousands of residents have already been forced to abandon their homes in search of improved conditions and higher ground (Garschagen et al., 2018).

Water scarcity and quality decline is a rapidly increasing challenges and becoming a top concern globally. To wisely manage water and achieve sustainable development, rapid and precise monitoring of water resources is crucial. Earth observation (EO) technologies play a key role in monitoring surface and underground water resources by providing rapid, continuous, high-quality, and low-cost EO data, products, and services. Currently, there are promising efforts in the use of EO technologies for water resource management but there are still huge gaps in the Africa region. The reason for the low utilization of EO technologies can be due to a lack of resources and funding including skilled and motivated human resources in the field and the lack of political commitment to foster EO products, data, and services. Therefore, the use of space technologies and their products to solve water-related problems needs collaborative efforts of all concerned stakeholders from global to local levels.