ACTO will facilitate the articulation among the countries to obtain compatible information about the basin to inform the decision-making community of IWRM and the conservation of aquatic ecosystems, through the Amazon Basin Project.
The ACTO which features the ARO (Amazon Regional Observatory) gave a presentation of the Situation Room to the participants of the Workshop. This way, the countries were able to observe directly the advances and functions of the Regional Network of Monitoring the Quality of Water and Amazonian Hydrological Network, which forms part of the integrated systems of monitoring, information, and environmental conservation, which are the focus of the Amazon Basin Project to carry out the tasks of its Component 3, to monitor not only the water resources but also the ecosystems that the waters feed, through a regional environmental monitoring system.
In the Workshop, other integrated systems were presented, such as the integrated satellite system for erosion, transportation, and sedimentation, one of the most difficult monitoring processes to execute given the extent of the Basin.
Due to this reason, being able to incorporate satellite data from the experience of the Member countries and their national allies to establish national and regional monitoring systems and strengthen the Amazon Regional Observatory (ARO) through the early-warning instruments will be crucial in the region to inform emerging situations of risks, threats, and vulnerability of the population and ecosystem, which will contribute on making timely decisions, especially in this period of climate change, which is another front line of work of the Amazon Basin Project.
On the other hand, there are global indicators, such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) agreed upon in 2015, the indicators of the Global Water Action Platform by UN-Water to support the implementation of SDG on water, and the indicators of the Transboundary Waters Assessment Programme (TWAP), which tracks 286 transboundary basins around the world from their open platform sharing good practices and information.
Furthermore, GEMS/Water, a program created by WHO and UNEP, monitors the quality of water, among other indicators, identifying problems and solutions for sustainable and integrated management of water resources.
Through this Amazon Basin Project, ACTO seeks to establish its own indicators and common protocols for hydrologic monitoring, quality of water, and erosion, transportation of sedimentation (ETS), as well as the exchange of compatible and standardized data for the Amazon Basin, in a way that it could be shared and disseminated in TWAP and GEMS/Water.
As a result of the Workshop, ACTO will seek ways to strengthen the national capacities with UNEP, WHO, IPH, and IRD for integrated monitoring of the water resources in the Amazon Basin.
