Mapping Water Sources And Users At The Catchment Level To Democratize Data And Inform Decisions
By Julie King
An interview with Dr. Alex Money, founder and managing director of Oxford Earth Observation, from World Water Week in Stockholm.
At the end of World Water Week 2022, I was left with two takeaways. Number one, there was a sense of urgency, combined with the sobering message that little if anything has changed in practical terms since the first conference I attended in 2015. And secondly, there were two noteworthy shifts when people talked about water.
The first shift was in discussions about water scarcity and community engagement. In 2015, these topics were exclusively relegated to issues suffered by “developing countries”. In 2022, the same themes were delivered by headline presenters from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and Las Vegas Valley Water District. Even a cursory review of the Financial Times in August reinforces this new reality: Water is everyone’s problem now, from Lahore to London to Los Angeles.
The second shift was in the emergence of digital technologies as the solution for the future, to better optimize, manage, and — importantly — monitor water risks and the availability of water and to establish the true value of water at the catchment level.
My interview with Dr. Alex Money demonstrates this fundamental change in narrative, where the assumptions that water is free or abundant are unravelling. In fact, the awareness is crystalizing that water is, and has been, misused and grossly undervalued.
Dr. Money and his company Oxford Earth Observation (OxEO) are integrating multiple open-source data sets and will make this information available for free to all water users and stakeholders at catchment level to inform the decisions required to determine the value of water.
Alex, can you provide an overview of Oxford Earth Observation as a company and its mission?
Alex: Yes, Oxford Earth Observation collects information about water risks that is not generally available in order to make it available and actionable. We bring together a large number of available, high-resolution data sets that are to a watershed/catchment level profile. In the first instance, we will make data open-source to inform decision-making. The next phase will be commercialization.
For Oxford Earth Observation, the game-changer for mapping out watersheds or catchments is the open-source data sets that are now available — for example, Google Dynamic World and data available from Deltares in the Netherlands. The satellite images of crops or agricultural areas are of very high quality. And data sets are becoming available for every area.
In the next stage, we are concentrating on building the use case by adding another layer of analysis of these combined high-resolution data sets. We can show the high demand areas around a basin and have high-grade information on available water sources in the areas and look at water availability by source and water use by type — such as agriculture, industry, and human consumption, for example, in urban areas.
How far along is OxEO’s mapping efforts?
Alex: We are further ahead in some markets. For example, mining. We’ve mapped individual assets. We know where the mines are, what company is mining, and the type of mine — e.g., gold, copper, etc. — and how much is being produced. We have mapped 90% by market value of the mining sector. We know what material is being mined and how much water is used to produce the level of what is being mined. We know the price of metals from trading exchanges.
The short-term objective is for everyone in a catchment area to understand the sources of water in that area and how it is being used. That information isn’t available right now. There is a lot of new data available now through Google Dynamic World, Deltares, and other open sources. We are integrating these different sources.
The medium-term objective is to help everyone — all water users in the catchment — understand the value of the water being used. We will apply the use case by the use of the water and give everyone access to the data so they are able to understand the source of the water being used, what it is being used for, and the value of what is being produced with the amount of water required to produce it. The approach is to ascribe value to water.
Who is the target buyer for Oxford Earth Observation?
Alex: We distinguish between customers of our information and clients. Customers include regulatory bodies, government agencies, policy organizations, and community groups. We intend to make this data open-source to inform decision-making at this level.
Secondly, there are our clients to whom we will sell information. At this commercial stage, we will add a layer of analysis for companies to inform and assess the value of water at catchment level and their use of water to better understand local water risks and to inform their water stewardship strategies. We will focus on basins, the water supply picture, the effect of climate change and rainwater, and the demand of water use by different users around a basin or catchment.
By the end of the first quarter of 2023, we expect to have catchment-level dynamics mapped out to provide this data on the 100 key basins worldwide. The aim with this is to help all water users in these catchments understand how water is supplied and used so water risks can be assessed and the value of water determined.
We feel consumers are the change agent going forward. We want to equip them with information to inform their decisions and to be able to give their input on how water is consumed by the community.
In your research, analysis, and the integrated data sets used by OxEO, what in your opinion are the “must haves” for the next five years?
Number one, we must move away from asymmetric access to information, where some people know some stuff but don’t allow others to have it. There needs to be asset-level data available to everyone. For example, the food and beverage sector is not great at saying where their plants are located or information on suppliers in their supply chain. They consider it sensitive commercial information. It isn’t commercially sensitive. The community and all water users need that information to assess water risks; investors need access to that information. There needs to be democratization of asset-level information because it tells how much water is used in agricultural production, in supply chains, and for industrial footprints. This accounts for 90% of all water use.
We add all other high-resolution data to open-source data sets, such as population data and data showing changes in migration. There is a direct correlation between income and wealth-level and water consumption. Water is an economic good. We synthesize these new sets of information that weren’t available five years ago to assess and map out the underlying supply and demand for water within catchments, which can inform future infrastructure investments, availability of water by source, water quality, etc.
Secondly, there is a gap between the group of people who build shiny things and the group who knows what is needed for the sustainability of water supply availability, such as NGOs [non-governmental organizations] and water governance specialists. We cannot just rely on aging data or replicating specific case studies. Now there are exploding clusters of activities. What do these tell us about water supplies? What are the heuristics and proxies to interpret human activities to inform how to map these areas?
Choosing between the production of shiny objects — which produce profits for producers and investors — must be balanced against the environmental or water costs required to produce those shiny objects. There may be a rebalancing of power based on these tradeoffs. We provide visibility of data to inform the choices required for such tradeoffs.
This is important for the social compact accountability between a company and the local community. The availability of quality information optimizes the decision-making for these tradeoffs.
Dr. Alex Money has 15 years of experience in the capital markets, starting out as a graduate trainee at Citibank Global Asset Management (now part of Legg Mason) before joining Bessemer Trust, where he ran emerging market and Japanese equity portfolios. He later founded a successful capital markets advisory firm and returned to Oxford University for a masters and doctorate to focus on environmental risk. In addition to founding and managing Oxford Earth Observation, Dr. Money is Research Director at Oxford Smith School, a research hub for practitioners where he teaches and does supervisory work. He also directs results-based funds, working with service providers to fund refurbishment of rural water delivery mechanisms in developing countries, such as financing the maintenance and repair of non-operational hand pumps.
Julie King is a senior consultant in digital water technologies and is an experienced organizer, developer, and coordinator of international commercial projects with business, academic, NGOs, new tech, and international organization partners. She is a long-time contributor to Water Online in the water, environmental, tech, and international development and financing space.