Water4All has elaborated a White Paper outlining a hite Paper of a European Water Data Ecosystem.

The White Paper has been developed in consultation with a Working Group of Water4All Task C.4.3, but being a living document, input from a broader circle is necessary.

The White Paper is now being circulated beyond the Water4All partnership in order to initiate a broader dialogue – but with this mail also broadly within the partnership. A new and updated version is envisaged within the 4^th quarter of 2025.

The white paper link is available at the bottom of this page.

White Paper Aim

The aim of the White Paper is to lay the foundation for an international dialogue on strengthening a process towards a vision of creating a joint Water Data Ecosystem. The context is to ensure that adequate foundation of FAIR environment data, including the entire water cycle, is valuable for a suite of important decision support tools is available. And that this requires a Water Data Ecosystem to enable FAIRification of water data – making water data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable, thus facilitating cost efficient data sharing enabling realization of optimal digitalization of the water sector.

The White Paper is intentionally written in a non-technical language, allowing for bringing attention to the leadership levels of the need to perceive data as a strategic asset. This version of the White Paper does therefore not mention specific standards, which will be for a later stage.

For your information, please note that the White Paper primarily focuses on data about the environment, not (so much) about data in technical infrastructure or in laboratories. This is, however, not so clearly explained in the document.

Your reflections and comments will therefore be highly appreciated, especially addressing the following questions: 

• Does the White Paper communicate the vision, its value potential, related problems, and barriers, as well as recommendations in a convincing manner?
• Do you overall agree with the approach of the White Paper?
• How do you foresee further use of the White Paper? Who should receive the White Paper and be invited to take part in the dialogue?
• And which concrete steps could be taken to bring operational changes regarding data management in the water sector?

The current version is anticipated for a non-technical audience. Bullets 1 and 2 look into the big “Why?”, while bullets 3 and 4 points to that a revised version of the document could bring more focus to the next steps of the process towards a European Water Data Ecosystem.

If not already done, please provide your feedback to Henrik Dissing - hendi@miljoeportal.dk