 Good morning everybody. Welcome to the first alumni seminar today, so of the year. My name is Elga Salvadori and I'm replacing Martin Seidel that couldn't be here today. So we have some changes, some technical tests that we have been doing this morning. And I would like to introduce you briefly the speaker. So this is Professor Wimbus Jansen. He will give a presentation on Water Accounting Plus, democratizing data for better decision making. He's the first professor on water accounting and he's doing his work here at UNESCO ICHI, but he's also a professor at TU Delft on remote sensing and he's also a professor in Thailand at the University of Thailand. But I don't want to take too much time away from this, so I would like to give the floor to Professor Wimbus Jansen. Just a few technical things. If you follow the previous seminars, you notice that you could send questions via Twitter. Well, this time this option is not available, so if you have questions, you can send them during this presentation at alumni at UNESCO ICHI.org and we will collect the questions and select the best one and we will ask the questions to the speaker. So welcome Professor Wimbus Jansen, the floor is yours. Okay, well thank you very much Elga for these nice words. So yeah, good morning, good afternoon. We have people from sharing from all over the world. And it's a great pleasure to tell you in this next hour more on water accounting. Water accounting is rapidly gaining terrain. A lot of people realize that we need better systems to report on our water resources and the purpose of water accounting is exactly that. So we have one hour. We go through some slides on the background and I will tell you also some examples of studies that we are doing. We will from time to time ask you also some questions so that we get a kind of active participation and I would like to stop more or less after 40 minutes so that we have one block of central questions on all kind of things that come to your mind or you would like to have clarifications on. So let's start with the presentation. Yes, we all have the issue of growing population while the amount of land that is used for agriculture remains the same. We get the situation that the area of land per person is going down. So if you look at the 1960s on this slide you can see that per person we had about 0.45 hectare available to produce food but this has reduced below 0.25 a few years ago. So we really have this immense challenge to produce much more food but from a lower amount of land which implies that the production per unit land has to increase and this has a big impact on water resources. At the same time we have competition between different water use sectors and also here on this graph we see the same trend that the per capita water availability is going down. So you can see that water availability in developing countries is going down but also in developed countries. So this problem is arising everywhere in the world. So we have to really start to think better on how we can use our water resources more efficiently. The reason I brought up this agriculture straight from the beginning is the fact that we have a huge water footprint for our food. You may think about your daily needs of water for households to satisfy your domestic water demands and this is about 15 litres per day. But what we do forget often is that on the same day we use about 3,500 litres to satisfy all the water needs for our food production. So this is a huge amount of water and sometimes I tell my students like are you eating bread or are you drinking bread? Because we really use a tremendous amount of water and this is putting an extra dimension to the issue of scarcity. So keep in mind that about 70% or 70 times more water is needed for food production than for drinking. And as a result we get this competition and we get water stress. Now the situation of water management is often solved at the river basin scale. We think in terms of management units of water and the water divide is our main boundary between different areas and this boundary can be used to divide the world into river basins. And as you can see on this picture is that in certain basins in Africa and also in America and Asia we get to a critical level that the water is getting scarce. And this also happens in dry seasons. Very often dry seasons will be confronted with a shortage of water and currently we have now a new situation in Somalia and Yemen where you really have to start thinking on every drop of water. So you would really like to know how your water is used and consumed. So it is often forgotten that environments also a huge and large amount of water. So it's not only water for the domestic sector or for agriculture but also environments. Very often on water allocation plans this is a kind of missing. But it's a choice. If your government wants to have greener environments and also wants to satisfy say a policy with let's say green lungs where we have a green growth, we have good economy but at the same time also a very fit ecology now we have to put water aside to environment and not only for leaching of water but also to make sufficient water available for wetlands and not treat wetlands as the end users of the system. That in case water is left you can send water to wetlands but if the water is used then wetlands can suffer. And also we have many systems with groundwater interceptions. On this slide you can see that you have all kinds of vegetation that also locally take a lot of groundwater and technically there is also a withdrawal of water. It's the same as pumping this water out from aquifers. But often in planning of water this is not getting a proper place. So my plea here is if we look at water accounts we should also include this water for environments. One other issue that we often are very uncareful about is say the aquifers. So we have a lot of aquifers where we just pump water from and not always there is a very good plan in place. You could plan water resources and you could see how much water you could abstract from a certain place but it is very important to have a kind of a plan. Often the situation is that people invest in an own well so that they can flexibly operate this. Availability of groundwater is very good for the user. He can switch on the pump when he or she likes that and you will have water immediately. But is that really a wise water management? That is not so often the case. Many areas in the world we have a fall of the water table. So in order to also get some feedback this one hour from the audience and all of you that are listening we would like to raise questions from time to time and actually this is a moment for the first question. The first question is why do you over-explode groundwater? We see many areas in the world where the water tables are falling by one meter or sometimes five meters per year. It is not always clear why this is happening. So are there some people listening that can provide some answers to the fact why we use so much groundwater? So this is your time to join in and participate. Please go to, I hope you can read it, and in a moment I will also share on the screen the question. Or you can use, you can download the app for your phone like you did probably for the previous seminars. Ready? So the question Wim was asking is, so please you can use this number to join the questions. There will be four questions. This is a 5846504. I will repeat this number from time to time, but this will not change throughout the, I hope you can see this. So if you type this and I see already there are six players so probably they played already before. Please mention your name and perhaps your country, where you are from. So that we are able to use this as some sort of statistics. Now we will wait till the moment to see how many, if there will be a few more players. And then we will continue. I see now 13. I joined already. Good, join. Please join. Please come in. Use the code 5846504. Don't be shy. Join us today and think about this question. Why in your country or the areas that you're working, you are over exploiting Groundwater? We want to know what is the reason for that. At least your interpretation of this process. Shall we go? 19 so far. 20. Okay. I guess you can continue joining even though the, then I'll wait a bit more. Even though the question is on, I think you can join in with the next questions. The next four or five questions. Okay. Let's start. You will have 30 seconds to answer the question and there will be four options. So why do we have over exploitation of groundwater? Because we pump too much. We cannot measure groundwater. We have not a management plan in place and groundwater is always the recharge. So basically there is no over exploitation. Can they give multiple answers or we only want the best answer? They can say more than one question could be right. I think into your system you can only answer one question, but we can have a discussion afterwards. This is the outcome of the answer. So if you want to comment about. Yeah, I can see now that most of you think that we pump too much and this is indeed the main reason and there is no restriction. Very often there is complete freedom and electricity is subsidized or diesel is subsidized. So pumping does not cost water in many countries and it's so nice. If I was an irrigator and if I can just switch on my own pump and get the water on the field, yeah, that is an advantage for the farmer. But the problem is that we are ruining the aquifers. And so in the end this is not really the way we should look at it. And the last say 10 years have been dramatic in terms of more and more over exploitation. So I think sooner or later we really have to get this on the political agenda. The policy makers should not get away with just leaving this open ended. So indeed the question in the seven is the most relevant. Okay, so what we do now we go back to the presentation and we take a few more slides and then we will have a few additional questions. So we have to switch some software here. So indeed, so the groundwater is the same. Now we have already as I mentioned several problems but unfortunately we make a lot of wrong decisions at the same time. People are not always properly informed. Or sometimes it's an issue that you have learned maybe 20 years ago or maybe even your university professor. And yeah, it still happens that in many cases there is a lot of investment from international finance institutes but often for the wrong purpose. So for instance number one is that in our practice we see a lot of groundwater pumping but there is no exploitation plan. Or as you can see in many countries there is a conflict between the water demand for hydropower versus the water demand for irrigation. And then actually all the dams are releasing valuable water for instance in the winter season for generating energy where the crops need to water in the summer season. So this is a big issue. Or if the dams are full at the start of the after rainy season and then if you get a big flood you have no capability to store that water. Also in many documents that we see from World Bank and other investment banks is that the improvement of efficiency is mentioned as a kind of solution like the water crisis can be mitigated by improving efficiencies and that is really not always the case. We have seen many examples and studies where they improved locally efficiency but then they forgot to think about the downstream impact. So then in the end people who usually were receiving the return flow were suddenly not receiving that water any longer which is basically a flaw. Forestry is very good for many reasons but we should also not forget that forests consume a lot of water. So if you plant a lot of extra forests or you do reforestation you should also realize that you will get less stream flow. And one other aspect that I like to mention is that in the exploitation of water resources we forget about a lot of natural withdrawals that occur in by ground water dependent ecosystems or shallow water tables and so on. So we are in a situation that we need some more support. So if you ask experts, local experts on the situation you often get different interpretations. One may say there is much more water available than somebody else and they think that they have the same basis that they have the same understanding on how much water is available but in reality that is not always the case. So what we really believe and that is why UNESCO and its partners have started a water accounting procedure since three years ago is the need for an independent accounting system. Because if you have provinces or countries sharing transboundary basins the trust is always an issue. So if one gives data or if one country makes analysis of the river basin system another country will start to doubt. So we believe that an independent system is very valuable so that you always have a second estimate in your pocket that you can check how much water is in the system. So that is the water accounting. And we call our system the water accounting plus. The reason is that the International Water Management Institute has developed water accounting already in the 90s by a publication of David Molden and basically we have been building up on that. So we made it water accounting plus and now we report in terms of eight sheets. So the whole idea is that a policymaker can get sheets. It's very similar to financial accounting where also you have a number of sheets you have your profit and loss you have your deprivation tables you have your cash book and so on. And this has helped many financial institutions and companies and governmental organizations function simply better from a financial point of view because there is a standard system that everybody understands. The whole water accounting is the same idea but instead of dollars and rupees and donks we have now cubic meters of water. So we report on how much water is in the basin how much water is consumed we call that the water consumption sheet we look at water use and agriculture we have a special sheet for that we look at the amount of water in the surface water network like streams and lakes and rivers separately we have a sheet for groundwater and also for ecosystem services because they are getting more and more important we not only want to have a good economy and a good life quality situation high quality life but also one with a very good and ecological system. So we have thematic sheets that help us to explain that. So what we can derive from these sheets is something like is my water used beneficially or non-beneficially we make calculations for that and we have developed standard procedures that is the idea that we have a standard procedure based on standard input data this input data can be verified they are all taken from open access data sources I come back to that in a minute but I really would like people to check it that they go back to the origin of the data and to know where it's coming from and so we think in terms of beneficial use if the water consumed or non-consumed consumed water means it's not longer available to downstream people is it utilized or still utilizable which means we can further develop water resources is it green or blue water? We make this distinction although we know not everyone likes the label of using colors but green water is water that is really coming from rainfall there are not many human interactions it just infiltrates into the soil and then it evaporates by the vegetation so that is really completely different process from water that is in lakes and in groundwater and so on I have here on this slide a number of typical things we discuss when we have to make water resources plans and longer term plans like many countries make and water resources plan for the longer term and these kind of elements should be embedded in those plans the point is that these kind of things we can read from the sheets and so in other words the water accounting sheets can be used as an input into your national water resources plans but also on your longer term river basin plan and it also touches base we think like water security and water scarcity Okay, so having said that then we like to come to the next question so question number two is like yeah, how does it contribute? how can water accounting plus really contribute to make a better decision? Elga, can you get some actions here and get people to respond? Yes, I'll try my best so first I'm moving between myself and then I can show you the image and then we can move to the next question so like he said is how can water accounting contribute to make better decisions and here you have three options four options and 30 seconds so again multiple answers could be correct so there is not just one correct answer I see some answers are coming in six, seven, eight still have eight seconds come on people then we'll press the correct color show your opinion yes, that's the answer 18, manage and I see a quite a mixed group yeah, so the first group says look, it is important that we have the same level of information to everybody and I think indeed that is very important what you see in decision making is that the persons from the Ministry of Water Resources have a lot of information and then the people from the Ministry of Agriculture which they sometimes consider as the enemy they have a different information and it's amazing how they sit in the same board room and they have a completely different view so absolutely this is an important thing but also the monitoring which is the second here is very important but if you make a good plan but if you do not have the ability to monitor and check it with your targets it will be very difficult so a long-term plan means you have a target you have a target on agricultural water, environment, sustainability and you have to start monitoring it so these are really the two major answers that are valid so we can go back to our presentation yeah, we move on I hope it all works for you so far we are not getting signals that something is not getting through so we assume it's all good okay, so we move on so yeah, some people they say that what is the difference with the classical water balance? we already make water balances for hundreds of years and I always say look it is more we also work on a water balance and from water accounting you can create a balance but what is nice is that we do this by land use class so a natural environment will always respond in a different way from rainfall and then for instance an urban environment the fast runoff is very different which has consequences for flood risk but also the recharge of your aquifer is different and the amount of water that's evaporated and basically is consumed is very much different so if you want to make a good analysis on yeah, what are my benefits of water you have to understand which kind of land use you have and see we have all kinds of services and benefits so we would like to think a little bit broader we also like to think about ecosystem services forests although they use a lot of water they are also a main habitat for many species they sequester carbon but also many irrigation systems can cool the climate and so in the vicinity of an irrigation system the air temperature can really be a few degrees lower than in a dry land agricultural ecosystem so we have to think about this as well so it's not only food that we have to think about and our own life and leisure but also we have to think about environment and I want to mention one more time environment takes a lot of water so it's more than a waterbath we look at every land use class and this land use class is the basis to evaluate the total package of benefits so if we look at the river basin we have all kind of options we have different land use classes and in water accounting we basically follow these four categories main categories so protected land use is when you have a national park modified land use is when you have land use changes often this is rain fat cropping but also growth of urban areas and that's where actually you change the land use but if you change the land use you change the infiltration, you change the soil moisture you change the evaporation you're not literally holding the water or so on but you affect the water balance the class manage water use you hold the water, you retain it you divert it you spray it you utilize it and so on and the last category is more the natural cover there are different options to intervene in the water cycle and to make things more sustainable now this sheet number one is an example of only one output this shows you a bit the total picture of the basin that's why we call it the resource base it's a kind of summary like how much water do we have the upper green part is meant to show how much water is used in the landscape without human intervention and the blue part below is on the exploitable water and which part is still going to the sea and so on I will not discuss them in detail you can review it more quietly later on and also we have a website wateraccounting.org that I will mention also one more time later on but on the wateraccounting.org you can really review these sheets in more detail important is that we distinguish between water that we withdraw from a source and the amount that we consume that water is gone and the water is not consumed basically returns back and could be reused so by distinguishing essential building blocks in the water cycle of withdrawal consumptive use and return flow we also can start to quantify the reuse of water efficiency which is the fraction that can be consumed and the water productivity because we would like to have maximum benefits from water that is consumed now the problem is always the data and as I mentioned in the introduction we would like to have a global standard the aim is that in 2020 we will report about the water resources conditions in all the major river basins in the world you and water has asked for that and basically we need to work with global data sets we cannot simply go to a single country and collect all the data or even start to install new sensors in the field because that will really take too much time we have to start using data we know that's not so easy people always say we have everything we have all the data but if you go to a country X you see many cups of tea before finally you get this data and then if you get this data the quality is not always up to standard so it is very important that we unlock data the way we do that is through remote sensing so satellite data is a very important input into the water accounting because the image taken yesterday is available today and we have many Earth observation satellites now everyone has a different mission and we collect all this data together remote sensing is a very good tool of measuring processes but they measure the processes at the land surface so if you would like to know what happens also in the underground you have to integrate the remote sensing data say with data that comes from hydrological models now many countries have local hydrological models some models are very good some models maybe are a bit more inaccurate because the amount of data to calibrate them are not available so to overcome that problem we use a lot these global hydrological models so we have now these models a 10 kilometer spatial resolution and we use that for instance to determine process of recharge and groundwater movement and so on of course ground measurements are always needed we love ground measurements but it is also a fact that to have ground measurements in a standard way is not an easy task so we use it when we work with local organizations with local ministries with local departments with local research institutes as to the extent possible but they are really meant to support a whole case and then the result of that is not only sheets and maps because we have remote sensing data so we can have also data on every 100 meter or 250 meter but also we make tables so for the scientific advisors or policy makers they can get tables with much more detailed output that the policy maker does not want to see and everything is in Python Python is the language computer language of the future freeware and all the spatial data analysis in the world are more and more based on Python so I am also glad to mention that UNESCO IHE has now also started the first courses in Python this is the language of the future now when you speak about remote sensing I can imagine that you would like to know what is it really what can I really get and on this slide you can see an essential difference on the left hand column you can see data that at this moment you can basically go to a website and download the only thing is you have to know which websites and this website we did some quality checking the middle column is much more meant for data that you have to derive indirectly which means you have to collect the primary data first from websites and then in the second column you have to apply algorithms or interpretation models to get for instance to dry matter production or water withdrawals and so it's not that you can get global water withdrawal data on our website you have to kind of produce that and within the water accounting team we would like you to help with that which brings us to the third question we will do that that is like what is your opinion of this remote sensing data and mainly on the accuracy so the question is what do you think about the accuracy of using remote sensing data there are always people that say look I want to check it in the field with my own team with my own devices but they forget that remote sensing is also a device it's not a simulation or an estimation it is a pure measurement so what is the accuracy of remote sensing data and in case you want to join again 5, 8, 4, 6, 5, or 4 we got 11 answers ok let's go to 25 come on you have 11 more seconds I cannot see the camera ok this is time ok so in blue it says it depends on the database some of them they are positive they say it's very accurate some one person is pessimistic he or she may have a poor experience but indeed I think the blue isn't the right answer because we have so many different databases some of the databases are really good created by high quality staff members in certain specialized laboratories and for instance a model or a database like Chirps Rainfall and there is a huge group of people behind it they have been applying it for many years and these kind of databases can really be good and digital elevation model can also be very good but not everyone is having the same accuracy of course and that's why we have this presentation today is also we would like to involve you we would like you also to help us with field data collection students from us can go to fields from us can help in sharing data and we believe that that will be a positive contribution to the accuracy of our system now the last part of my presentation is more related to some applications an example of this remote sensing this first slide is from Pondless Up which is a very big wetland in Cambodia and here we just show you an example of how data on if-up or transpiration mapping based on remote sensing is used to calculate how much green and blue water consumption we have so this first picture is on the dry season so there is 5 months with a very low rainfall and during this period the main land use depends on blue water picture and you can see that it is substantial whereas the green water is very little now if we move then to the opposite so we go to the next one in the period of high rainfall and then we see that the blue water is very limited because all the water you need is provided by rainfall we use this kind of data from images to create the sheets and many of the sheets that we produce have a monthly interval so you can really check month by month what is going on we think that is a good say temporal resolution weekly is too much you get too much data daily is absolutely you need a different type of model like a decision support model water accounting is meant for a longer term plan monthly data then is fine you can show differences in storage and differences in water volumes and like in this example differences in green and blue water this is an example of land use from remote sensing mapping this is the Mara basin in Kenya and here we have combined Landsat information at 30 meter pixels 30 meter by 30 meter with field information so our alumni have helped to validate this map and then you can make detailed analysis so you can really see which area is covered by corn or which area is under grass or other types of land use and again if we have a proper land use information we can also know much better on how the water is used now these days water productivity ranks very high on the agenda people also look if we have a water crisis we have to improve water productivity and that is indeed a very logical choice because it is defined as the production per unit of water so don't confuse it with efficiency as I showed in the previous slides this is much more a fraction of which percentage of water is arriving at a certain destination production is much more like how much crop biomass or crop yield do I get or how much dollars do I gain or how many jobs I get per unit of water and say it is very much used until now in the field of agriculture and I guess in the future we will expand this more into the field of ecosystem services so people speak about it but what I always like to see is an example and this is an example of a study we did with FAO in Morocco so the pixel size here is 250 meters it is perhaps a little bit coarse but then you can cover an entire country so on this picture you can see for wheat that there are many farmers who reach 2 kg of wheat or even 2.5 kg of wheat per cubic meter of water these kind of maps can be computed now from satellite data we don't need to go to the field and measure flows because we define it per unit of water consumed and the unit per water consumed is expressed into evapotranspiration which is one of our data sets so it shows you how farmers are doing very well or actually systems because you look at country scale and you can look at systems in other provinces where the productivity is lower on the next slide it's the same concept but now we zoom in you have a little bit this Google Earth effect that you can zoom in into the crop and then you can see almost individual fields this is based on a 30 meter it was a study we are currently doing and the Asian Development Bank has embraced water accounting and they would like to test it in more than 6 countries in Asia as a pilot study to find out what the response is from governments and how to detect how you can guide governments on making better policies for instance Vietnam wants to have much higher water productivity and this is an analysis typically in area of 10 by 10 km let's say at irrigation scheme level where at the left hand picture we can see the productivity of rice so we can see farmers with 2 ton per hectare but if you go 500 meters further you can find farmers with 7 ton per hectare so you see enormous differences in short distance not always very clear if you are in the field in this picture we can see how much water they need or consume to reach that production so you can really see huge differences which means there is also a lot of opportunity to locally improve water productivity so we summarized these water use things in agricultural sheets so this is an example that you can also review from our website and this one is very much hydrologically related we cannot have flow stations everywhere and this picture of the Mara shows you an example how we use remote sensing information on rainfall and ET to estimate river flow so automatically the location of streams are detected using an elevation model and then we accumulate the total runoff so that everywhere in actually every 250 meter transit in a river we can estimate the monthly flows and that is very attractive for the planning the water levels are important and countries do not share it easily but we want to know how much water is in rivers or is in reservoirs and we have satellite based altimeters that can measure these levels and finally I show you here a picture on how we can compute water withdrawals for example from incremental basins a lot of irrigated agriculture so when we combine the layers of irrigated land together with data on ET and green ET and ET from blue water resources we can make maps of withdrawals so we can now really look into an individual polygon and check how much water they are pumping and even check that whether that is authorized or not by comparing it to water rights records this kind of spatial data is kind of the basic input we summarize that again in a sheet where we say how much water is attractive so to conclude I am going towards the end of my presentation the water accounting is something that we have been developing over the last three years and we do that as a partnership we do that with IMI at the Institute in Laos in Vietnam with FAO and also with UNESCO World Water Assessment Program so we have a partnership where we do this together and this is a little bit where we are at the moment so it started from 1996-1997 by David Moldin and at the same time we have started to work on the sciences needed to create the spatial data sets since 2013 we are really actively taking this up we do several pilot studies with ABB since 2014 we do a lot of capacity building and ELGA is really one of our captains here providing training to many countries on how to do this and then gradually we hope that more ministries will create their own let's say center for water accounting and we know that in India and in Egypt they have already decided to go for that and once you have the centers in place then also you can get success and you can only get good results if such a system is in place so this picture shows you countries in green and basins in orange where we do pilot studies so you can see that at this moment we are dominantly present in Asia and in Africa it is very likely that also some studies with the World Bank will start soon in the Americas we really would like to start rolling out this system now everything we make is open access our tools can be used and you can download them so there is this github.com that is the commonplace for software now these days and we have a github account for water accounting so all our Python script can be downloaded so researchers can do it also people that we provide training they will use the tools so that in the end we get one standard dataset for the world so we have a website if you want to have more information please visit wateraccounting.org we also have every summer a summer course of one week that is meant for basically our internal students but there is also some seats available for outsiders that really would like to learn more about this hopefully in 2018 we can also start a one year master course in water accounting so with this I hope I have given you a first glimpse of what we do and I think now Olga we should move maybe to more general questions and answers so now it's the time if you're interested and you want to ask any question to Professor Wim Basjantan you can send your question via email at alumni at unascoig.org we already have received one question the first question from Oliver from Rwanda and he's asking about groundwater so he wants to know how water accounting plus takes into account groundwater boundaries which might be sometimes different from conventional hydrological boundaries now thank you very much for this question indeed an aquifer is behaving independently from a river basin so we use also global groundwater models for this purpose we are not doing that ourselves that will be way too much work but we have a very close interaction with the University of Utrecht who made a kind of a global mudflow model based on all kind of I would say best possible data on the boundaries of aquifers that are currently available that also includes data from IGRAC and they have enriched this data sets further so we know and we realize that aquifers may have different boundaries and we use different sources to describe these boundaries okay since we are still waiting for some more questions then perhaps I can also ask some I prepared a few to facilitate the discussion on the topic and let's say that I am working for a government and I want to find ways to reduce water scarcity or I want to increase water supply and how in practice a partnership framework can help now that's a good question as I mentioned in the beginning water scarcity is getting worse and worse so what we should not do in my view is just make a basin green or red and that is too simple there is no need to do that that you do if you have no data but we have now all the data we have data at every 250 meters we have the data for every land use class so we can really look much better where is the problem is it in the irrigation or is it in the wetlands or is it in the forest or is it in the urban areas and during which periods so first I think you have to better understand the magnitude of the problem and where in the basin it does occur and I think here I like that we have spatial data so we can see it, it's not a guess we can use the images to find out where is it occurring and then the second step is that we work on a number of solutions so solutions can be manifold, there is not a standard solution we have different kind of solutions in terms of maybe we can reduce the water demand for instance there are options to reduce the growing season of a certain crop or you can do something else to reduce the demand of water so because water scarcity is usually the difference between the demand and the amount of water that is supplied so reducing the amount is one thing the other thing is to increase the supply the very common approach that is widely applied in monsoonal systems there is more storage storage can be through high dams but it can also be very local sometimes local solutions can be very efficient especially at village level at the community level you would like to have local solutions one thing is to make small catchment facilities like small water harvesting facilities but also you can stimulate the recharge if you can have more local recharge of groundwater then it will also help to make water available actually during the dry season again a monsoonal system will have too much water in the wet season but will have a shortage of water in the dry season and then the water accounting actually we can make in a way that you can check this alternative solution and say now what about if we do this or what about if we do that and then you can check how your account will change and if the account will change favorably then you know that you have found a good solution the accounting can also be used to appraise alternative solutions to overcome water scarcity thank you very much we have received the second question now from alumni from Nigeria and this person is saying that during the presentation you have been talking about Python you mentioned Python as the computer language of the future and I think they want to get a little bit more information and also some highlights why is it so? what I observe is that there is now a trend moving or going on from let's say commercial packages on GS and remote sensing to more free so that many more people can start using it and what you see is that all these packages have one common language which is Python and also it gives you a lot of flexibility it's easy to learn and to apply I would say it's almost like a new MATLAB you have many functions you can do great things so even with a few days of lessons you can do quick analysis and it's fun you have your own question you have your own concern that you want to analyze and maybe the standard things will not provide that and then you make your own Python and then suddenly wow now I have even a map where I can find the solution okay thank you very much I think we have no more time for questions unfortunately we will see a few more but it's not possible because we have to close in a couple of minutes I want to thank you all for participating to this online seminar and I would like to remind you that the second alumni online seminar will be the 23rd of May at the same time and it will be so the topic the presentation will be expanding expanding the Panama Canal and it will be given by a future alumni of UNESCO ICHI who will graduate soon in April 2017 so thank you so much, thank you for watching thank you Professor Liba Sjansson it was a great presentation it was my pleasure and thank you really for giving me the opportunity to explain the work that we do and for the whole world if you visit our website you can always send an email message we are really with a team now you are solving the water accounts thank you very much for your time