A new progress tracker for freshwater action has been launched by Systems Change Lab, a platform that monitors critical shifts needed to protect people and the planet, assessing progress toward international targets and identifying opportunities to deliver on systemic approaches to tackling the world’s sustainability challenges.

Fresh water sustains life across Earth. Freshwater ecosystems support nearly 10 per cent of all known species, provide drinking water, sustain food production, generate energy, help regulate the climate and underpin livelihoods. They ensure our survival, while covering less than one per cent of the Earth's surface.

Developed with support from UNEP-WCMC, the new Freshwater System online tracker finds that global action to protect freshwater systems is not keeping up with the threats they face. Efforts to safeguard fresh water and freshwater systems are lagging across nearly every measure.

The Freshwater System brings together the latest evidence, underpinned by UNEP-WCMC researchers’ work and expertise, on global progress across the transformations needed to protect the world’s freshwater systems.

The Freshwater System explains the six key changes or ‘shifts’ that are required to sustain freshwater systems, such as minimizing disruptions to the water cycle and restoring freshwater ecosystems. For each shift it measures progress using data, targets and indicators to show whether the world is on track, falling behind or moving in the right direction, supporting governments, businesses, investors and researchers to identify where more action is needed.

As experts in global nature indicators and online data systems, UNEP-WCMC researchers carried out the scientific review of the evidence underpinning each of the six shifts, and contributed technical expertise to the overall development of the Freshwater System.

Pressures on fresh water outpace global action

UNEP-WCMC researchers worked with Systems Change Lab, the World Resources Institute and the Bezos Earth Fund to identify 37 ‘outcome indicators’. These assess progress against key global climate, biodiversity and equity goals and targets related to fresh water. They found that: 

• Four are headed in the right direction but remain “well off track”, including access to clean water and mangrove restoration.  
• Five are headed in the right direction but lack quantitative targets, including surface water and groundwater quality and heavy metal contamination.  
• Eleven are heading in the wrong direction entirely, including groundwater levels, flood risk and the proportion of freshwater species that are depleted.
• Seventeen have insufficient data to track progress, including wetland loss, lake restoration and overfishing pressure.

The launch also includes more than 80 additional indicators that identify both enabling conditions that may help achieve short- and long-term targets, as well as critical barriers to transformational change.

Urgent action to safeguard fresh water and freshwater systems

The findings come as growing pressures on freshwater systems drive increasingly severe impacts. Communities around the world are grappling with rising water stress and scarcity, worsening floods, prolonged droughts and degraded water quality, and billions of people still lack access to clean water. 

Transforming freshwater systems will require minimizing disruptions to the water cycle — including by protecting and restoring freshwater ecosystems — and tackling major drivers of biodiversity loss, including pollution, overexploitation and the spread of invasive alien species. At the same time, the world must ensure equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water, sanitation and hygiene for all.

UNEP-WCMC supports this mission by providing technical expertise and evidence-based solutions to help countries and the private sector understand water usage and sustainability. Recent examples include assessing whether existing online data systems are sufficient to measure the pressures on freshwater ecosystems, building a business case in five drought-prone regions for nature-based solutions as tools to ensure water, food and energy security, and creating tools to navigate ecosystem-based adaptation measures. ENCORE, a tool developed by UNEP-WCMC and partners, helps financial institutions and companies assess their use and dependencies on nature, including relating to fresh water and freshwater systems. 

Together, these tools are helping to turn freshwater data into better decisions for our future.

Main image: Kuang Si Falls, fed by the Nam Si river, in Lao People's Democratic Republic (Image © Jack Sutton)