Water, Data and Climate Change
Changing the Dialogue and Decision-making Process through Qlik
Without water, life on the planet isn’t sustainable. Making up over 2/3 of the earth’s surface, water quality and availability is under siege in too many areas of the world. Given the increase in extreme climate events over the last few years, the global community is finding populations in need of not only larger humanitarian aid efforts, but also ways to address the associated water crises that arise due to shifting weather patterns and drought.
The situation is only expected to get worse – according to the World Wildlife Foundation:
- 1.1 billon people lack access to water;
- 2.7 billion people find water scarce for at least one month of the year;
- At current consumption rates, by 2025 two thirds of the world’s population may face water shortages.
- An initial visual dashboard developed as part of the Clinton Global Initiative for Circle of Blue, Columbia Water Center and the Pacific Institute. The dashboard created a single view into data sets from various sources to help understand water availability and consumption in different parts of the United States. Using data from USGS, USDA and EPA sources, officials could look at water well data and cross reference that with drilling rights data to see on a county level where water was going to potentially be oversubscribed in California.
- In partnership with KPMG, a variation of this Qlik dashboard is deployed in multiple parts of India to measure water well levels and current scarcity levels to help plan for short and near-term infrastructure needs.
- In Brazil, our partnership with iMaps has enabled the Nature Conservancy to use a version of Qlik’s water dashboard as part of the Green Blue Water Coalition. This effort brings together corporate leaders from organizations such as Nestle to work from a common set of data regarding water availably and usage from the Amazon to create balanced and sustainable efforts around water rights, access and usage.
In every instance, there are a few common elements: unlocking data from previously untapped resources such as research papers; corelating multiple data resources for a larger and more complete view of the current and future states; and having one location for all relevant parties to have a deeper and value-added discussion on mutually beneficial and sustainable solutions.
Qlik is dedicated to serving its role in helping to unlock data around water issues and adding value to all of these current and future conversations as water availability and sustainability is central to humanity’s ability to thrive now and in the future.
