This tailor-made training, funded by Nuffic as part of the Mena Scholarship Programme and requested by The Center for Conservation and Development of Sustainable Ecosystems (ZIPAK) in Iran, focused on providing participants with relevant hands-on experience in tools and techniques to enhance their capacity to manage (protected) ecosystems in Iran.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in Pakistan has recently secured Green Climate Fund (GCF) funds for increasing the climate resilience of agriculture and water management in the Indus Basin. Given the region’s climate vulnerability, it is critical to improve information services and build the country’s capacity to use this information to cope with the impacts of climate change on the agriculture and water sector. Establishing a water accounting system is the first step to better managing water resources and maintaining agricultural yield; however, limited technical capacity and lack of ground data remains a challenge. Therefore, FutureWater aims to not only offer an improved understanding of water accounting for key stakeholders but also conduct a capacity needs assessment to design and deliver tailor-made trainings which will focus on using open-access datasets to implement water accounting at different spatial scales.

This tailor-made training, funded by Nuffic and requested by the staff of the The Ministry of Agriculture of the Government of the Republic of Zambia (GRZ), aims to help improving soil water management and crop productivity at the national level. The training focuses on building capacity of participants in accessing and using public data and innovative open source tools. Modules are designed specifically considering the requesting organization needs and take place over a period of 5 months, combining both online and in-person sessions. In total, 5 modules are provided combining both theoretical sessions and and self-paced exercises.

The Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific (RAP) of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has recently secured funds to continue a program of training on ReWaS, which is a simple tool to estimate the potential for generating real water savings from various agronomic, water management and technical practices in irrigated agriculture. The tool was developed by FutureWater as part of FAO RAP’s developing regional program on water scarcity in Asia and the Pacific. So far successful trainings have been held in Nepal, Vietnam, Malaysia and Iran. The training program will now be extended to Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Afghanistan and Thailand. By the end of the training, participants will have a solid understanding of the linkages between field interventions and basin-scale hydrology, in addition to being able to quantify these impacts.

This tailor-made training, funded by Nuffic and requested by the staff of the college of Agriculture of Basra University, aims to help mitigate soil and water salinization problems hampering agricultural production in Iraq. The training focuses on accessing and using innovative data and tools in the public domain, to gain insight into salinity issues, improve salinity control and enhancing agricultural production in Iraq by analyzing crop performance and assessing irrigation management. Next to building capacity of participants in accessing and using innovative public-domain data, tools and models to analyze water resources and support climate-smart irrigation strategies, a key objective is to strengthen collaboration and partnerships between Dutch and Iraqi institutions in the fields of water management, agriculture, and education.

The ‘Farmers Toolkit’ as presented in this project contains various geodata tools applicable for farmers to assist their decision-making and adopt climate smart agricultural practices. This project launches a training program on these tools, which are: Flying Sensors, irrigation advisory services (IrriWatch portal), WaPOR and Google Earthengine Apps, and Climate Risk Assessments. The training providers consortium (FutureWater, IrriWatch, Delphy, Cairo University and HiView) are tailoring the activities towards the requirements of the selected beneficiaries which are private companies, consultants, and NGO’s active as extension officers in the agricultural sector of Egypt. The training program is a unique combination of face-to-face training, online teaching, and field schools conducted throughout the growing season of 2021.

FutureWater will conduct the bio-physical assessment and hydrological analysis for the Mukungwa and Akagera Lower Catchments in Rwanda. The project will be the basis for two catchment plans to be developed through the “EIWRM Project”, funded by the Government of the Netherlands and implemented by a consortium led by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). FutureWater is very proud that it has another opportunity to do a project in Rwanda.

The Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation’s (SDCs) Global Programme Climate Change and Environment (GP CCE) India is supporting the operationalization of climate change adaptation actions in the mountain states of Uttarakhand, Sikkim and Himachal Pradesh through the phase two of the “Strengthening State Strategies for Climate Action” (3SCA) project that was launched in 2020. Within this framework SDC has granted a project to FutureWater, together with Utrecht University, The Energy and Resources Institute, the University of Geneva and a few individual experts. The activities in this project focus on the development and application of climate responsive models and approaches for integrated water resources management (IWRM) for a selected glacier-fed sub-basin system in Uttarakhand and that at the same will find place in relevant policy frameworks paving way for their replication across the Indian Himalayan Region (IHR) and other mountainous regions.

This online training was provided over a period of 8 weeks for 25 participants selected by NARC (National Agricultural Research Centre) Jordan. The online training consisted of self-paced exercises and regular live (video) sessions provided through the OpenCourseWare website of IHE Delft. The four modules provided in this training will be both practical and technical with information on how to set up a drone unit (including selection of equipment and operational management), hands-on imagery processing, and advisory services to farmers.

The main objective is to enhance the capacity of DWIR staff in using innovative data and tools to analyze water resources and support water management. The training is organized with a very practical approach and strongly built upon the ‘learning-by-doing’ principles. Participants use freely accessible satellite-derived data to gain insight in and knowledge of the hydrological system and surface water bodies. The training allows DWIR to embed Google Earth Engine in their decision-making processes. Unique about this training is the focus on DWIR regional-level offices, which have limited capacity in working with these data and tools.

FutureWater will provide a Tailor Made Training to water professionals at the Rwanda Water Resources Board (RWB) on Water Allocation Modeling and Remote Sensing Analysis. About 20 participants of the RWB are thought to work with the Water Evaluation And Planning model WEAP and the Remote Sensing platform of Google Earth Engine (GEE), state of the art technologies that are excellent for Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM). With improved knowledge on these tools, the professionals of RWB are able to better quantify current and future impacts on the water resources of Rwanda and thus improve the quality of their advise to their stakeholders.

This course on hydrology and water allocation modelling is organized for the Kenya Water Resources Authority (WRA) and funded by the Blue Deal program of the Netherlands. The first four-week course block introduces the participants to the main concepts in hydrology, hydrological modelling and data collection, including remote sensing. Exercises are provided on water balances, land use datasets, extraction of rainfall data from remote sensing datasets, among others. The 5-week second block of the training is on the use of a water resources system model (WEAP) for water allocation. Participants will learn how to develop, run and evaluate a model, including scenario analysis, water balances, assess impact of changing priorities among users, and impacts on water shortage.

Client: RVO

FutureWater, HiView and ThirdEye Kenya have partnered with Egerton University (Crops, Horticulture & Soils Department) to conduct a tailor-made training on ‘Crop models and remote sensing for water management in agricultural systems’. This training project is funded by the NUFFIC – TMT program.

Hydropower production in Indonesia is the main renewable energy source in the country. There is a potential to double the capacity by building new hydropower plants and to optimize current plants. PLN is the main hydropower company in the country. The project aims at enhancing the capacity of its staff by developing an eLearning package on hydrology and climate change in the context of hydropower.

The assignment supports the newly established Inle Lake Management Authority (ILMA) by developing up-to-date, spatial datasets, which are to be included in the ILMA geodatabase. More specifically, the existing Inle Lake MAB boundary and zoning are confirmed and updated. Maps of land-use and different ecosystem services are produced and validated in close consultation with stakeholders. In addition, the development of communications and educational materials is supported, and key government staff is trained on ecosystem services mapping.

The PROMAC II project is an ongoing project of NCBA Clusa introducing conservation farming practices to various locations in the Manica, Tete and Zambezia provinces, with the objective to increase agricultural productivity. This project incorporates flying sensor activities in the PROMAC II project as a M&E indicator of the practices and as an innovative technology for providing technical staff with spatial information on crop development. Flying sensor imagery can provide data at regular intervals with high spatial resolution and an additional camera for vegetation stress detection. This information is used to analyze the productivity of selected areas. Flying Sensor technology will be used to support the PROMAC II project with data collection on crop development and comparative analysis between areas with traditional practices vs. conservation agriculture practices.

This tailor-made training enhanced capacity of Yangon Technological University (YTU) educational staff in using Google Earth Engine to analyse water resources and support water management. Technical staff of Department of Meteorology and Hydrology (DMH) and the Department of Water resources and Improvement of River systems (DWIR) also participated to gain advanced skills in working with satellite-derived data to support flood monitoring and risk mitigation, water efficiency improvements to enhance food security, and drought monitoring.

The overall project objective is to compile an inventory of agricultural field interventions and develop a training package to evaluate Real Water Savings from irrigated fields, to systems and basins. A guidance document is developed for agricultural field interventions by compiling a literature database containing published experiences and results of various interventions. Impacts on water savings and crop yields are summarized in this inventory and translated into the guidance document. The training package includes a user-friendly Real Water Savings evaluation tool, a comprehensive manual, case study applications and a link with the inventory compiled in the guidance document. Training workshops will be conducted, aiming participants from target countries (e.g. Nepal and Vietnam) and aligning with existing FAO work in Asia. Feedback from the training will be used to update and refine the training package. The training package will be set-up so that it can be used independently, including clear examples, questions and answers, and do-it-yourself guidance.

This training was attended by sixteen researchers (seven female and nine male) from IOF, Department of Hydrology and Meteorology (DHM), Central Department of Hydrology and Meteorology (CDHM), Department of Forests and Soil Conservation and the Institute of Engineering (IOE). The overall objective of this training was to ensure the use of open source data in the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform to assess the hydrological regime of data sparse regions in Nepal. The participants used freely available geospatial images to make a landuse map of their region of interest using the GEE platform. Further, they used these landuse maps to understand the changes to the hydrological regime of their region using the SPHY hydrological model, developed by FutureWater. The SPHY model can be applied by a wider range of experts with basic hydrological and computer skills, through user interfaces, including a data preprocessing tool. Moreover, the participants were able to extract and process the projected future precipitation and temperature data using KNMI Climate Explorer. Participants used the delta change method to create the future climate change scenarios. They were able to use the future projected climate data with the SPHY model to assess the climate change impacts on the hydrological regime for their region of interest.